
Class JElE I 

Book . l_^ Z_. 



Copyright N°_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 



THE REVEREND AND THE PROFESSOR 

DAVID SWING 



WITH A CHARACTERIZATION BY NEWELL DWIGHT 

HILLIS, D.D., AND INTRODUCTION BY FRANK 

WAKELEY GUNSAULUS, D.D. ALSO A 

POEM BY DR. GUNSAULUS 



EDITED BY 

SOPHIE BURT KIMBALL 



Tip fxev yap aXrjde'i izavra aovddsi ra ondp^ovra r<p Sk 
(peodel Ta%b dta<pa>vei rdXrjde<: — Abistotle 



CHICAGO: MCMV 



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JUN 14 


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// 7 * g ^ 

COKV B. 



Copyright, 1905 

By SOPHIE B. KIMBALL 

(All rights reserved) 






SHk ILaftfstlre ^rtse 

DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY 
CHICAGO 



TO 

DAVID SWING AND HIS TWO FOLLOWERS 

POETS, PREACHEES, ORATORS, 

IN RECOGNITION OF THE LOYALTY AND DEVOTION THAT 

'KEEP THE ANGEL'S SONG IN 

THE SANCTUARY,' 

AND THEIR EARNEST EFFORTS TO INSPIRE THEIR FELLOW-MEN 

WITH A HIGHER KNOWLEDGE 

OF THE ETHICS AND BLESSING OF JESUS CHRIST 



PREFATORY NOTE 

Among American authors, few stand before us whose person- 
ality is more clearly defined than that of Rev. David Swing. 

No serious attempt has ever been made to bring together in 
completeness his work. The publication of fragmentary writings., 
not in concert, may at first seem a literary offense, but there is 
pleaded a versatile public, and the relations of much written 
matter, powerful when delivered, but, like flowers passed on to 
others because their purpose has been served, now, to the casual 
reader, valueless. 

The text from his most mature and last unpublished writings 
has been scrupulously revised, inspired by the hope of illumina- 
tion through long listening to the poet-preacher. Some variation 
with the original order has taken place, in an attempt to bring 
material together in acceptable form. The subject headings are 
Prof. Swing's choice. 

In the selection the editor is entirely responsible. Notes taken 
by her at conversational lectures, also certain personal correspond- 
ence, were to be included, but want of more "ample room" requires 
their omission. 

Two words of our author, "along come," hold the keynote of 
his life and writings. 

"When historians all deceive us, along comes some word to 
whisper to us the most precious truth." 

S. B. K. 

Chicago, June, 1905. 



SYNOPSIS 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTION 13 

Frank Wakeley Gunsaulus, D.D. 

DAVID SWING 29 

Newell Dwight Hillis, D.D. 

THE ADMIRATION OF BEAUTY 

Nature and Man 41 

Worship in the Beauty of Holiness .... 48 

The Out-Door Age 55 

Utility and Beauty 63 

Toil and Repose 73 

Faith and Happiness 78 

God's Spirit in Man 82 

THE HUMAN MULTITUDE— THOSE STRANGE 
HEIRS OF TWO WORLDS! 

Humanity 93 

Christ and Paganism 95 

Whom Shall We Follow? 103 

Feed My Lambs 110 

An Eclectic Christianity 121 

A Scientific Christianity . . . . . . . 128 

The Intervening God 135 

The Fullness of Civilization 143 

A Thousand Happy Years . . . . .148 

The Historical Scene 156 

A Simpler and Greater Religion . . . . .165 

The Education of the Heart 171 

The Religious Spirit 177 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

The Realities of Religion 183 

Be Meek in Spirit 185 

The Son of God 194 

The Race of Seventy Miles 203 

AGAR A 

The Modern Respect for Mankind . . . . 211 

A Book of Remembrance 219 

The Poets and Immortality 229 

EPILOGUE 



10 



INTRODUCTION 



INTRODUCTION 



'How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that 
bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good 
tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy 
God reigneth!' 

We need a line from the most rich and literary of the poets 
of the Hebrew nation to initiate in our hearts, and especially in 
our speech, any fitting recognition of the unique and precious 
treasure which our city and our land have lost in the death of 
David Swing. It is necessary also that it be a verse of that 
poetry which describes the ministry, not so much of a great 
ecclesiastic, clad in pontifical robes, or that of an urgent con- 
tender for some revered proposition of belief, as that of the 
prophet who in the echoes of yesterday and the din of to-day 
perceives the soft and chastened eloquence of to-morrow, if in 
any way the passage may serve as a prelude to our thought of 
him who for a quarter of a century stood in the twilight in the 
name of the ample dawn. 

The words that will accord with our grief and harmonize 
with our grateful sense of what God gave this city when he gave 
us David Swing must also be full of a sincere and calm opti- 
mism. They must radiate with that rapturous faith in the 
triumph of goodness which rang like a vital note through all his 
music. They must carry his glowing assurance that the history 
of man is the history of a divine progress. For this faith was 
the sky under which his eye beheld the contest of energies divine 
and diabolic, the eddies in the stream of man's life that so often 
appear to testify to a receding river, and, beholding them all, 
he never faltered and never feared. 

Words from any literature that may suit the hour when we 
strew rosemary on the grave of David Swing must open the 
mind toward that gateway into the realm of ideas which is called 
the beautiful, for with him, as with the great novelist, 'beauty 
is part of the finished language by which God speaks.' And 
so I have chosen the passage from Isaiah: 'How beautiful 
upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tid- 

13 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

ings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, 
that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God 
reigneth ! ' 

He himself has said, 'There is no tribe or race which is not 
aware of such a something as the beautiful. ' Every race whose 
stream of blood entered or influenced the veins of this prose-poet 
contributed its highest aesthetic instinct and commandment unto 
him. To his spirit, as to Emerson's, 'beauty was its own excuse 
for being. ' He allowed no argument in favor of what was ugly; 
that which was beautiful, for him needed no apology or praise. 
All his mind's powers ceased to question the right of the beauti- 
ful to be and to rule, at the moment this unfailing eye found it 
beautiful; and at the instant of his discovery that a thing was 
not beautiful all his own beauty of soul, with playful irony, 
stinging sarcasm, and wealth of moral enthusiasm, set itself for 
its destruction. He went through our work-a-day world with 
a serene faith, like that of Keats, that 'a thing of beauty is a joy 
forever'; and his vision of the immortal life was the seer's picture 
of the survival of the beautiful. Throughout his childhood, 
youth, and for twenty years of his public career he lived in the 
valley of Ohio, of all valleys the most sure to stimulate and 
enrich this aesthetic sense. All through his sermons and essays 
we find pictures of what nature gave to this singularly rich and 
suggestive mind. They were criteria for years to come by 
which beauty might be recognized. They were facts so fair, 
and the fancies they inspired were so glorious, as to make his 
pages of essays and sermons true to nature and the soul in their 
truest moods. The aching seed and the April shower, the rich, 
black valley loam opening its wealth of motherhood for the seed, 
the rose that hesitantly met the earliest hour of June with fra- 
grant kisses, the bees, gold-corsleted, that five on the lips of 
clover bloom, the long, green lines of corn, the yellow, wave- 
like valley of wheat, the rosy fruit of autumn, and the 
white snows of winter — all these come and go, as we think of 
the youth sitting by the old fireplace and watching the play of 
splendor in the flame, or as in the brilliant 'day he labors or 
dreams in the field, or at night he broods beneath the white 
magnificence of stars. 

It was all culture of the sentiment that says, 'life and conduct 
must be beautiful.' At college this child of Athens, who had 
been born nearer the Ohio than Ilyssus, found his own native 

14 



INTRODUCTION 



Greece, and wandered along the edge of the blue iEgean with 
Socrates and Plato, heard Sophocles recite his tragedies and 
beheld Phidias carve the Parthenon frieze; for he had a singu- 
larly inspiring teacher who then and there gave a new life and 
career to this soul who loved the beautiful. In his own child- 
hood's home with those he loved, he had learned what his whole 
life illustrated, and what Mrs. Browning has so often repeated 
on his lips: 

' The essence of all beauty, I call love; 
The attribute, the evidence, and end ; 
The consummation to the inward sense 
Of beauty apprehended from without, 
I still call love.' 

But the Greek youth, nursed on Hellenic food, was pre- 
destined, and now he was reinspired by his study of Greek 
literature and Greek art to be the apostle of the beautiful. To 
him evermore the beautiful became good. He found the ethical 
side of beauty. Professor Swing's spirit was too spacious and 
too nearly full-orbed not to find within itself the experience 
which responded to and identified itself with the ebb and flow 
of the tide of life and thought and achievement in all the great 
nations. He had too sincere and truthful a sense of the imperial 
value of righteousness not to reflect, at some times very vividly, 
at all times quite faithfully, the quality and message of the 
Hebrew people to mankind. Yet the quality of his nature, the 
attitude of his mind, the method of its approach to truth, was 
that of the Greek, rather than that of the Hebrew. None knew 
better than he that God had called these two peoples each to an 
unique task in the bringing in of the kingdom of God, which to 
David Swing and to us means the consummate achieving of the 
dream of civilization. The Hebrew wrought for righteousness; 
for this the nation was called to be a royal priesthood. In quite 
another manner, as characteristic of God's providence, as truly 
emphasizing the gift of the genius of the Greek, did Jehovah 
call the Greek to a royal priesthood also. He called the Greeks 
to be an intellectual aristocracy, as he called the Hebrews to be 
a spiritual aristocracy, and both did he call to minister unto all 
humanity. In each case, the unique and precious stream flowed 
between banks of patriotic conviction. 

The Greek was called to be an artistic nation: his Sinai 

15 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

revealed the law of beauty: God called the Hebrew to be 'an 
holy nation;' his Sinai revealed the laws of righteousness. It 
is certainly true that David Swing was a preacher of the message 
of the Hebrew — righteousness; but he approached it, he loved 
it, he championed it, as a Greek. To him righteousness was 
the moral side of beauty, and looking upon his career and its 
gracious influence, we repeat the Hebrew's words: 'How 
beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth 
good tidings.' It was this Greek spirit that made him able to 
so speak the 'good tidings' that his preaching was literature. 
He knew the holiness of beauty. 

So great, however, was the moral uplift of his nature toward 
a perception of and a yearning for the supreme beauty — 'the 
beauty of holiness,' as the Hebrew poet names it — that he was 
always telling us: 'It must be inferred that there is a moral 
aesthetics which outranks the physical forms of beauty. The 
moral kingdom does not destroy the other empire. It is the 
old story of 'empire within empire,' 'wheel within wheel,' 
but with this caution that moral beauty is the greater of the two 
kingdoms. Moral aesthetics is what our age now needs.' This 
is what the Hebrew singer had in mind, when he sang: 'O 
worship the Lord, in the Beauty of Holiness.' To this, the 
heart and eloquence of David Swing responded for eight and 
twenty years in our great materialistic city; but it was a Greek, 
clad with the splendor of a Christian knight, who uttered his 
plea with all that sobriety of statement, that artistic regard for 
the beautiful, which made him the finest essayist who has stood 
in the pulpit of the nineteenth century. As we hear some more 
Hebraic gospeller utter his Ezekiel-like oracles to some valley 
of dry bones, or listen to some evangelist or reformer hurl his 
warnings or maledictions against iniquity, remembering this 
sane and refined soul, we say with that most Grecian of recent 
anthologists: 

' Where are the flawless form, 
The sweet propriety of measured phrase, 

The words that clothe the idea, not disguise, 
Horizons pure from haze, 

And calm, clear vision of Hellenic eyes? 

1 Strength ever veiled by grace; 
The mind's anatomy implied, not shown; 
No gaspings for the vague, no fruitless fires, 
Of those fair realms to which the soul aspires.' 

16 



INTRODUCTION 



The unique and unimagined value of such a man, holding 
so high a place in the moral culture of this community from 
1867 to 1894, cannot be overestimated. When he came hither 
filled with the results of years of scholarly investigation, calm 
with the vision given only to men of genuine idealism and cul- 
tured faith, fearless in the superb equipment of his learning, 
and trusting the whole world and its interests to the influence 
of truth, as only the scholar and the Christian does, we were 
just out of the thunder and moral dissipation of a civil war; huge 
fortunes had come as by magic to men who scarcely considered 
the ideal values in opportunity and influence which lie in a single 
dollar; we were at the beginning of a movement, in an industrial 
age, which has reaped enormous profits by the employment and 
direction of human beings along the ways of material progress; 
a city draining its unexampled vitality from a vast empire was 
rising like a huge vision before the cupidity and greed, the hope 
and reason, of the west. What a gift of God it was that then 
there came to you a soul, a human heart cultured to the percep- 
tion of the valuelessness of mere money and the supreme value 
of great ideas and noble sentiments, a brain that was certain of 
nothing so surely as that righteousness is moral beauty and that 
this beauty is, or ought to be, supreme! David Swing, at the 
opening of an age of gigantic material advancement, through 
years of persistently regnant materialism, in a city of tremendous 
practicalism, has been one of the most heroic and noble figures 
of our time, for he has been the scholar in the pulpit, the Chris- 
tian in society, the philosopher in our literature, and the beloved 
citizen of the ideal commonwealth in all our public and private 
policies. He has embodied in himself the mission of the Chris- 
tian scholar. 

What is the Christian scholar — the Greek ensouled with the 
genius of Hebrewdom ? 

He is the one being to whom life must always appear both 
as a vision and as a duty. The order of progress now and ever 
is, first 'the new heavens,' and then 'the new earth, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness. ' Life, as a vision into which have been 
gathered every noble idea, every true sentiment, and every worthy 
purpose, with all their victory and their hope — a vision awfully 
grand with the announcement that it hangs in the heavens to 
be obeyed, glorified with the assurance that it is to be realized 
on the earth — this is the truest gift which years of instruction 



17 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

and study may give to the scholar's soul. The scholar is the 
deliverer of men. He is the sworn acquaintance of something 
still more venerable than their revering age, something more 
ancient than their prudence, and into their solemn cautiousness 
concerning tradition, it is his to introduce the permanent which 
declines, because it needs not their endeavor to preserve its pedi- 
gree or to enforce silence. The scholar sees the reality be- 
neath all appearance, and it is his prerogative and fortune to 
furnish to the untrained his trained eye, that they too may know 
that there is a sky above and a river-bed beneath the flow of 
things. Wherever such a soul goes, there goes hope. He has 
had the experience of nature in his science, the experience of 
man with ideas and principles in his study of history, the ex- 
perience of man with himself in his fearless study of the soul, 
and 'experience worketh hope.' To the hopeless man who has 
seen his flag go out of sight as it fell beneath the feet of wrong 
he comes to lead him out of the atmosphere of momentary defeat 
to a larger induction and to bid him up and on. Wherever such 
a soul goes there goes resoluteness and self-respect. Such a 
man, prophet and oracle, has been David Swing. 

It was the Christian scholar's message of the infinite beauti- 
fulness and desirableness of truth which he came to give. 

His very manner and voice, his presence and attitude, made 
his message more powerful as a rebuke to our pretentiousness 
and self-satisfaction and a stimulus to our affection for high 
ideals and God-like sentiments. He seemed to brood wistfully, 
and, often with the whole statement before him, carefully written 
out, he paused, hesitating to handle truth, which had cost so 
much and was so dear, with anything but reverent care. He had 
worked an immense deal of ore into coin before he rose to speak, 
and he knew its worth too well and man's need too surely to 
jingle it before human cupidity as a common thing. But before 
he concluded his address, it was all our own. 

' He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
Brought the age of gold again.* 

That voice filled its strange stops with the peculiar quality of his 
view of life, the ' sweet reasonableness ' of his message, the native 
music of his melodious soul; and no monotony of earth ever 
seemed so varied in harmony or so increasingly beautiful as its 
utterance. When I heard him, I confess myself to have been 

18 



INTRODUCTION 



under such a spell as only the finest orators may create, while 
I was saying to myself that this is not oratory at all. His 
was the eloquence of self-command, of affectionate confidence 
in his latest-loved truth whose beauty he was then showing to 
us, lit up by a perfect faith that the angel he modestly cham- 
pioned would easily make her way in the world. 

In the hour of his supreme power, what resources he had, what 
forces came into his grasp ! He had a finer humor than Beecher ; 
it was radiant atmosphere, never tumultuous with stormful glee, 
but kindly, genial, an air in which the laughter rippled o'er the 
soul as the water moves when a swallow flies close to a quiet 
pool. In that radiance, buds of thought opened, seemingly 
without his touch; and unripe purposes grew golden in the 
warmth and glow. He had perfect mastery of sarcasm and 
irony. They never mastered him. In these rare moments of 
superlative power, his good humor kept the sharp edges from 
cutting a hair, while the blades flashed everywhither. Just at 
such an instant in his appeal, sober common sense, the strongest 
faculty or set of faculties which he possessed, uttered its behest, 
while fancy and memory played about the message as sweet 
children about a gracious queen. More than any or all of these 
was the man who stood so quietly there — the dear friend, the 
high-minded advocate of the good, the true, and the beautiful — 
urging us to a security of faith, a sanity of life, and a reasonable- 
ness of conduct like his own. Thus he became his own best 
argument. It was the eloquence not of speech, but of beautiful 
character. What Lowell quotes to describe the speech of the 
Concord seer may be quoted to describe him: 

' Was never eye did see that face, 

Was never ear did hear that tongue, 
Was never mind did mind his grace, 

That ever thought the travail long, 
But eyes, and ears, and every thought, 

Were with his sweet perfections caught. ' 

It is often said that Professor Swing was not a reformer, and 
that he possessed none of the qualities, and therefore had nothing 
of the career, of those heroic men who root up ancient and wide- 
branched wrongs and create a reign of righteousness. He was 
a philosopher, not a transformer of institutions and laws. The 
fact is that such a soul's contribution to the evolution of good- 

19 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

ness in the world is always of the highest importance. Ideas 
will always gather champions. Such a service as his is too likely 
to be underestimated, because it is so fundamental and so great. 
With a strange hesitancy as to accepting the conclusions of Dar- 
win, our preacher's mental method was that of an evolutionist. 
He trusted the development of involved ideas. The revolution- 
ist always attracts more attention and offers the picture of a 
more easily understood courage. But there would never be a 
revolutionist if the evolutionist, whose plea is reason and not 
a sword, whose appeal is to ideas that render battles useless, 
were heard. 

In the thick of the fight for some instantly demanded right- 
eousness, David Swing was not a Luther — fiery-tongued and 
dust-covered as the fray went on — he was rather an Erasmus, 
the temperate, calm scholar, who had already whetted the sword 
for a Luther's strong hands and held its fine blade ready for his 
service. But he was never beset with the cautiousness of Eras- 
mus. No Erasmus would ever have held the moral sense of the 
same community for all these years. He was Erasmus and 
Melancthon in one. His shy and clear-eyed soul reminds one 
of our own Emerson, whom Wendell Phillips, in the angry war- 
fare where he was using Emerson's ideas as fine Damascus 
blades, called 'that earthquake scholar at Concord,' of whom 
also Lowell has said: 'To him more than to all other causes 
together did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustain- 
ing strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching. in every 
record of their lives. ' From his benign place of culture David 
Swing has supplied epigrams which have become battle cries to 
many souls who, in the turmoil, are fighting the good fight, to 
whose successful issues he made the contribution of victorious 
ideas. He lit the beacon and has kept it burning, so that, in the 
contest of right against wrong, of intelligence against ignorance, 
of nobility of character against the vulgarity which exhibits its 
coat of arms or its wealth, the soldier of truth might not mistake 
a foe for a friend, or lose the path of triumph. His was the 
thinker's heroism — the finest in the life of man. He feared not 
the consequences of any truth; he feared only a comfortable lie, 
or a popular blunder. He was more than a Falkland with a 
Matthew Arnold to praise him, and to forget the lonely hours 
of Sir John Eliot and Hampden. He never cried peace where 
there was no peace. He always somehow got his word of cheer 

20 



INTRODUCTION 



to the beleaguered army of truth, even if he were not with them 
at the hour of their captivity. 

With the thinker's courage he trusted to the predestinated 
dominion of ideas, not only the fortunes of society, but also the 
future of the commonwealth and the hope of man. Not the 
lightning that smites and cleaves, still less the thunder that rolls 
and amazes, his was the soft and pervasive sunshine, bearing the 
secret fate of the summer and traveling with the molten snows, 
falling silently upon the ice-fields that gleam and shimmer as 
they slowly drip into the harvests of the future. 

He has lived for living ideas and generous sentiments, the 
exquisitely true statements of which are so generously left on his 
pages that they are sure to be in the hearts and on the lips of the 
men of to-morrow, and all this because of his serene faith in the 
native supremacy of the good, and the true, and the beautiful. 
This exalted and broad faith has given him breadth of interest 
and largeness of theme, and an unerring touch, as he has dealt 
with life's variety of problems. Above controversies, he has 
been so lofty as to provide for controversialists who would fain 
find the truth, the keys which unlock her treasure-houses. Our 
text describes him — 'beautiful on the mountains,' where a large 
view enabled him to see valleys of life running into one another, 
roadways seemingly opposed in direction gradually and surely 
tending toward each other. Oftentimes he would come down 
close to the hearts of the mistaken and debating searchers for 
truth, and usually he came to show them that each possessed 
some truth or ideal needed by the other, and that the pathway 
to righteousness and God was wide enough for them both. 

Such a supreme faith in the good and the true and the beauti- 
ful made his eye quick to discern its presence or absence in all 
places. He was therefore a wise appreciator of art, in which 
this Greek loved to behold a Hebrew lesson on righteousness, a 
penetrative and comprehensive critic of literature whose treas- 
ures lay at his feet, a patriotic and sympathetic thinker in pol- 
itics, which he would have baptized with Christian idealism, a 
true and broad-minded champion of religion, which he knew is 
the noblest concern of all human life. One could not read with 
him 'The Grammarian's Funeral' of Robert Browning, and see 
the face of David Swing, as he lived and toiled with the scholar- 
ship which made the renaissance victorious, without thinking, 
if he had actually been one of that age, he would have found 

21 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

such a grave also. But our Professor was more than one who 
'ground at grammar.' 

The mighty renaissance with which he had to do, and in the 
study of which the importance of his personality, its spirit and 
its gentle strength appear, has proved itself the greatest event 
in the history of religious thought since the reformation. The 
Oxford movement under the fascinating leadership of Newman 
never reached beyond the English and American Episcopal 
churches and the Roman Catholic church, in whose fold the 
leader found a home. At that hour there was afoot, under 
Maurice, Kingsley, and Stanley, a movement in England, in- 
spired by Coleridge, fast putting on robes of poetry in the lines 
of Tennyson and Browning, which, at a later hour, was sure to 
find responses here in the hearts and minds of such men as 
Beecher, Phillips Brooks, and David Swing. Earlier than 
cither of his great contemporaries, Professor Swing saw that this 
was the renaissance of the Greek spirit in theology. 

A lover of that ancient Rome where Greek literature still 
ruled her orators and poets, our Professor never could sympa- 
thize with mediaeval and theological Rome. The Almighty 
God and His government, as treated by the theologians of Rome, 
for nearly two thousand years, whether Catholic or Protestant, 
were only a huge Roman emperor exalted to omnipotence, and 
an empire where Roman justice and power alone were supreme. 
Orthodoxy had been partial to these thinkers, for Rome had been 
the seat of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy had, therefore, been fragmen- 
tary; outside of her accredited formularies were other truths 
quite as necessary for a full statement of Christianity. For 
example, the view of the atonement called orthodox was sympa- 
thetic with ideas of divine government borrowed from the Roman 
government; and as that government's view of justice and hu- 
manity was not exhaustive, so that theory of the atonement 
was partial, if not untrue. Against this, as well as against views 
of the inspiration of scripture and the theology which dogmatized 
as to the fate of the wicked, the Greek spirit rose in him to utter 
its word; not to fight, for this is not the business of ideas, but to 
utter its life as a flower expresses itself in fragrance and beauty, 
to initiate a genuine renaissance, a re-birth of hidden and forgot- 
ten truth. The whole movement of theology in the nineteenth 
century has been a re-uttering of this Greek spirit. Augustine, 
Athanasius, and Cyril of Jerusalem have yielded to Origen, 

22 



IN TRODUC TION 



Chrysostom, and Clement of Alexandria. Our Greek poet- 
preacher, uttering his too long delayed truth in preachers' prose, 
has proved himself a worthy successor of him who was called 
'golden-mouthed' at Antioch, and him who was named by 
Jerome ' the greatest master of the church after the apostles. ' 

As Emerson left the church whose life he inspired as has no 
theologian of our age, so David Swing retired from what was a 
battle-field, to give all sects the benignant and untroubled illumin- 
ation which was the radiance of his soul. Without the impulsive 
eloquence and massive movement of Beecher, but with more 
than Beecher's calm and propriety of utterance; without Phillips 
Brooks's vision of the whole human heart and his abounding 
religiousness of devotion to Jesus of Nazareth as the revelation 
of God, David Swing performed a service like theirs, to all reli- 
gious interests, in emancipating the mind of our time from the 
establishments of piety and the formularies of a partial 
faith. 

Such men are always called heretics. The truth is, they are 
the men of faith. They are those who do not believe less than 
the reactionary who would try them, or the conservative who 
distrusts them; but they believe more — not the same things and 
more things besides, but they believe more. When David 
Swing denied that God was limited to the methods of govern- 
ment mentioned by the Westminster Confession, he had a larger 
and more truly evangelical belief in God than his opposer. To- 
day the church of his boyhood comes to his grave, and one of 
her most eloquent orators embalms with odorous spices the 
heretic of yesterday. Intolerance is the only radical unbelief. 
No man has so little real faith as he who believes that God's 
truth needs his police duty to keep it alive, or to protect it from 
being stolen. 

When these men first spoke, critical wiseacres were pointed 
to the ruddy East; but they answered that some one's house was 
on fire, and forthwith they sought to extinguish the flame. It 
was the dawn — inextinguishable and glorious. Fearlessly, 
that movement which reddens the whole Orient may be trusted. 
It will journey on to complete the noontide. Looking at it, one 
sees that it is God's presence in man's deeper, larger faith. 

' And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn, 
God made himself an awful rose of dawn.' 



9.:\ 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

His interest in theology sprang from such a root as gave him 
a profound interest in the problem of society. He confronted 
it with the same principles, asked of its dogmatists the same 
questions, and answered its demands with the same faith. Just 
as he declined to believe in and preach a gospel of despair, which 
left a less loving God than Christ on the throne of the universe, 
so he declined to believe that the best civilization will permit 
capital to grow rich by child-labor, and lawlessness to destroy 
public order. His unmoved faith in God and man, under God's 
love, is at the basis of a dream of a better society, just as it was 
at the basis of a truer theology. 

The idea of God was Christianized in his deeper confidence; 
the same transformation must come to the life of man here be- 
low. As the vision of Christ, saying 'He that hath seen me 
hath seen the Father,' changed the conception of God, and 
made man a worshiper of the universal Fatherhood, so Christ 
in the life of man will change methods and bring about a uni- 
versal brotherhood. What makes for a true theology makes 
for a true sociology. 'No Christ-like soul,' he says, 'will con- 
sent to walk along through life or to heaven without wishing to 
drag all society with it to the sublime destiny. ' 

This deep faith made him the lover of men whose personal 
creeds were divergent from his own and whose methods he could 
not have adopted. It was enough that they were bringing in 
the better day. Full of admiration for the philosopher and 
scientist, he nevertheless said: 'It is not Comte or Tyndall who 
must plead with the begrimed miners of England; it is Moody 
and Sankey. ' He could trust any man whose soul was acquaint- 
ed with the large truths of the Nazarene, because he trusted 
them. 'The truths of Christ's reform,' he said, 'possess that 
impulse which comes from their lying outspread not only in 
the light of earth, but in that of eternity.' 

Perhaps his proclaimed vision of Christ was not inclusive 
of all the lines which love and worship have made for yours; but 
I never heard him more earnest than when he said to one who 
wished to substitute a paganism for Christianity: 'Even could 
we draw from the classics or Hindoo world a complete definition 
of manhood, we would seem to need a Christ to enable the 
human race to realize the dream betrayed in the definition.' 
'The cross is only an essential prelude to the new life.' Per- 
haps his humor lit up the true features of some doctrine so dear 

24 



INTRODUCTION 



to you that you mistook the kindly light for his repudiation of 
truth. Doubtless he saw more clearly those truths of which 
little is said in creeds; but this at least is true: the confession 
of faith he perpetually uttered and preached is made up of the 
sweetest hopes and the most frequently spoken commandments 
which moved the lips of Jesus Christ. 

Of unique and pervasive beautifulness of nature, of large 
and living scholarship, of most thorough religiousness of mind, 
of genuine American fiber and faith, he lived with us and died 
among us, the most beloved of our citizens, if not the most dis- 
tinguished; the most poetic of the prophets who has not left his 
life in his verse; the most genial and philosophical of American 
essayists, who was always a priest of goodness; our soul's friend, 
to whom we say: 'Hail and farewell.' 

Frank Wakeley Gunsaulus. 



25 



DAVID SWING 



DAVID SWING 

For twenty years and more the eager multitudes who loved 
David Swing thronged and crowded together, while he informed 
of beauty, traced the rugged truth, gave men vision and divine 
uplift. And other multitudes there were, whose feet indeed 
never trod aisles of Central Church, but who were wont to wait 
each week for his printed words, and when his message ceased 
they were as desert pilgrims who found the heavenly manna 
had ceased to fall, the great rock had ceased to flow in cooling 
streams. Unceasingly with pen and voice did he ply men with 
motives of culture and duty, seeking by light and darkness, by 
hope and love, to make men patriots, Christians — the veritable 
sons of God. Oft did he rejoice in our good fortune; full oft 
was he touched with our griefs; a thousand times he pointed 
out for us the paths wherein lay the most of happiness and the 
most of peace; and when at last his great friendly presence was 
withdrawn from our homes and streets, we found ourselves look- 
ing with altered eyes upon an altered world. 

When the news of his death came, it was with us as with 
Phillips Brooks when he learned of the death of his friend Rich- 
ardson, the architect of Trinity Church. In that hour the great 
preacher turned to the window, and in silence gazed long into 
the open sky. 'It is as if one should awake to find the mountain 
which one's window had always faced, and upon which one's 
eyes had always looked, suddenly and forever gone.' And now, 
though the first full year is past, the vanished feet still walk with 
us, the silenced voice still whispers in our dreams. Knitting 
our brows to the daily task, we have proved that death does exalt 
those who remain to weep; that our sorrows must ennoble duties, 
not end them; that our tombs and our tasks are entangled; that 
the rich blossoms of the heart grow crimson, nourished by our 
graves. And so we are here to-day to keep a tryst with mem- 
ory, and to remind ourselves what our friend was; what were the 
forces and causes that made him so; and by every motive of 
honor, to pledge ourselves anew to duty, to culture, to beauty; 

29 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

to God, to his divine and human Son who taught his servant how 
to 'dip his sword,' not in blood, but in 'heaven.' 

Here and now we remember that the true measure of a city's 
civilization is the quality of man it reveres and loves. Dying, 
Lord Bacon said: 'I leave my name and fame to foreign lands, 
and to my countrymen when some time be past.' It was to the 
shame of Florence that a century rolled by before her citizens 
were able to appreciate the exiled Dante, whose genius redeemed 
Florence out of meanness and obscurity. Ours is a world where 
the fathers kill the prophet to whose tomb the children throng in 
innumerable multitudes. But it is to the lasting praise of our 
city, and proves how high our society has risen in the scale of 
refinement and character, that in his lifetime an eager hearing 
was given to this sage, who spake of pure morals, whose theme 
was the folly of ignorance and vice, and the supremacy of truth 
and duty. 

We know that eloquence is partly in the orator's charm: an- 
other part is the kindling response of the appreciative hearer. 
And that generation must have loved the higher life and been 
touched to the finer issues, that loved this man who was the most 
refined of American preachers, and whose sermons and essays 
have a certain grace and delicacy and sweet completeness that 
make them altogether unique. Always our loves tell us what we 
are, and foretell what our children are to be. Whenever Provi- 
dence would order a forward movement of society, He raises up 
some giant who capitalizes the new spirit. Howard, Garrison, 
and Lincoln compact within themselves the diffused ideas of 
philanthropy, reform, liberty, and then flame these ideas forth 
upon the common people. Looking up to these leaders, soon 
the multitude went up and took a place beside these heroes. 

It seems, therefore, like a special token of divine favor that 
God sent us this man to capitalize before our people ideas of 
taste and beauty; of culture, patriotism, liberty and religion. 
For not our harbors crowded with ships, not our lake fringed 
with forests, not our mines, our factories, and our stores stuffed 
with treasure have been God's best gift to this people; God's best 
gift has been the gift of great men like Lincoln and Grant in 
statecraft; like Beecher and Brooks and Swing as teachers of 
religion. And to-day it is a source of joy and gratitude unspeak- 
able, that here in this new, rude, bustling city Providence sent 
one who seems like some Plato lifted out of his Athenian groves, 

30 



DAVID SWING 



and set down in the midst of our booths and markets, to build 
for us a temple with pure Ionic lines : to light upon its altars the 
sacred Hebrew flame. 

Recognizing his masterful genius, our editors, authors, and 
people have come to rank David Swing with the great pulpiteers 
of our generation. Comparing mind with mind, we speak of 
Spurgeon as devotional, Beecher as philosophical, Brooks as 
inspirational, Swing as poetical. Seeking a symbol of the quali- 
ties of each, we say that Spurgeon was a speaking trumpet, 
Brooks was a flaming heart, Beecher was a quaking thunder- 
bolt, Swing a singing harp. But when many attempts have been 
made to search out the power of this poet-preacher, his secret 
still remains a mystery. Until we know why the rose is sweet, or 
the sunbeam light, or the babe divine, we cannot know why the 
seer is the best benefactor of humanity. 

George William Curtis tells us that while the poet's power is 
less dramatic, less obvious, imposing, and immediate than the 
power of the statesman, the warrior, and the inventor, yet his 
influence is as deep, strong and abiding. For while the soldier 
fights for his native land, the poet clothes that land with charm 
and fires the warrior's heart with energy invincible; while the 
statesman organizes liberty, the poet feeds the sacred fires; while 
the inventor multiplies the conveniences of life, the poet deepens 
the lifespring itself. To-day we may not fully understand the 
power of our poet and seer, but we joyfully confess that he re- 
vealed to us our deeper convictions, filled us with fervor and 
aspiration, and, in an age of fret and fume, lifted us into the 
realm of tranquillity, through parable and poem teaching us 
where were the paths leading unto happiness and peace. 

When Macaulay was shown the vast clustering vine in Hamp- 
ton Court, with trunk like unto a tree, he expressed a wish to be- 
hold the mother root in Spain from which the scion was cut. 
Similarly, we confess to an eager desire to trace the ancestral 
forces that unite in this elect child of genius. No great man 
appears suddenly. Ancestral momentum explains unusual 
strength. The foothills slope upward toward the mountain- 
minded man. Each Emerson has back of him seven generations 
of scholars, who seem the favorites of heaven. Back of Henry 
Ward Beecher was a father who was at once a moral hero and an 
intellectual giant, and a mother who shot the coarse Beecher 
type through and through with rich, warm, glowing tones. Thus 

31 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

the students have traced our friend's parentage back to the border- 
lines of Alsace and Lorraine. There we front the old German 
stock, philosophical, scholarly, ponderous, yet mystical, and a 
dreamer of dreams. And over against the German stands the 
Norman, with a certain lightness and nimbleness of mind — 
graceful, imaginative, full of rollicking humor — his speech all 
rippling with sunshine and his lips bubbling over with lyric 
song. And Providence ordained that all the best qualities of 
these two types should converge and meet in this poet-preacher. 
As for the rest, all is veiled. His genius is an unread riddle. 

When the explorer has traced the River Nile back to the 
initial lake he has still fallen short of the source of that mighty 
stream. Above him in the distant clouds are the secret, invisible 
agencies out of which issue the summer's storms and the winter's 
snows that fill the springs and crowd the water on in massy flow. 
And the secret of greatness is partly ancestral, but chiefly divine. 
God breathes it. Its sources are in that holy of holies where 
dwell clouds and thick darkness. There God girded this man 
for his task, and sent him forth with faculties like the prophet's 
sword, all 'dipped in heaven.' 

Searching out the essential qualities of his sermons, an Eng- 
lish author has said: 'Other sermons are logical or instructive 
or inspiring, but Swing's always add that element of beauty that 
turns language into literature.' Misunderstanding this aesthetic 
element, some men have been captious and critical. But with 
David Swing beauty was no mere mush of aesthetics; no mere 
love of decoration and ornament. Beauty with him was not the 
frosting upon the cake; nor veneer upon the wood; nor Horace's 
purple patch upon an humble garment. Beauty was ripeness, 
soundness, maturity. Ugliness spake of broken laws. He saw 
that the pink flesh upon the cheek of the babe or maiden meant 
perfect health, and that the muddiness in the drunkard's eye 
was the sediment of sin. The soft flush upon the plum or purple 
cluster and the robe of loveliness cast o'er the yellow harvest 
fields was God's way of saying that His work was done, that 
things had come to ripeness and touched the limit of their growth. 

He knew that when conversation was carried up unto beauty 
it became eloquence; that knowledge carried up unto beauty 
became wisdom and refinement; that hut-building carried up 
unto beauty became temple-rearing; while the man who was just 
and gentle stood forth before his admiring vision with a moral 

32 



DAVID SWING 



beauty beyond that of an Apollo. Therefore he revolted from 
sin as from a form of ugliness and vulgarity. As Shakespeare 
passed by the vixen and scold to select an Imogen or Rosalind, 
as Titian preferred the noble soldier's face before Iago's, dimmed 
with passion and seamed with sensuality, so with winning grace 
Swing placed his gentle emphasis upon ' whatsoever things were 
lovely, whatsoever things were pure,' seeking to bring men unto 
that harmony and symmetry that betray the beauty of God 
upon them. 

Here in this vast center of greed and gain, where Mammon 
threatens to master men, where youth is charmed with the glitter 
of coin as birds with the glitter of snakes' eyes, where stores and 
the treasure in them, factories and the wealth by them, threatens 
to eclipse the hidden things of the soul, here he stood for twenty 
years urging that the beautiful is the useful, that life is more than 
meat, that earth is not a stable, nor its food fodder, nor its chil- 
dren beasts, but that man is what he is at his best estate when he 
dwells in the realm of knowledge and hope and love. Only the 
next generation can tell how much he did to strengthen those 
sentiments that manifest themselves in libraries, museums, art 
galleries, institutions of higher education. But it is for this gen- 
eration to be grateful that God saw our city's need, and raised 
him up to be with others what Bacon calls, the 'architect of states.' 

We who loved him know that another striking characteristic 
was the seer-like quality of his thinking. Many of his sermons 
were visions into which were gathered all our hopes and aspira- 
tions, all our ideals, with their sweet torment and discontent, 
with their certain triumph and victory. In these higher moods 
he saw things unseen, dreamed dreams, fought battles, and some- 
times perceived afar off that glad day when the columns of society 
should encamp upon the heights and hang out signals of victory. 
Nothing proves the creative mind like this imaginative element. 
The pragmatist does not understand it. Beholding a tree, the 
strict scholastic sees nothing but firewood. His unit of meas- 
urement is a tapeline, and he estimates its moral value in terms 
of heat and flame for sinners. He fears exceedingly when the 
seer declares that a tree's chief use is to tell of the goings of God 
among the branches; that a tree sings hymns and is a hostelry of 
delight; that a tree is a living creature, its song perfume, its 
words fruit. But the tree presents these aspects, and the seer 
must tell what he sees. 

33 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

The imagination is a prophet. It is God's forerunner. It 
plants hard problems as seeds, rears these germs into trees, and 
from them gathers the ripe fruit. It wins victories before battles 
are fought. It works in many realms. Without it civilization 
would be impossible. Working in things useful it enables Watt 
to organize his engine; working 'midst the beautiful, it fashions 
pictures and rears cathedrals; working with ideas, it creates in- 
tellectual systems; working in morals, it constructs ethical sys- 
tems; working toward immortality, it bids cooling streams, fruit- 
ful trees, sweet sounds, all noble friendships report themselves 
beyond the grave. For faith itself is but the imagination, allied 
with confidence, that God is able to realize all our highest ideals. 

Without this seer-like element life would be utterly un- 
endurable, and society would perish under sheer weight of 
drudgery. Each youthful Clay endures the privations of the corn- 
field, each Garfield the pain and poverty of the canal path, because 
imagination unveils the future and reveals a day when the youth 
shall build thrones, lead armies, organize laws. And each re- 
former endures as did the prisoner in the Castle of Chillon. 
When the little seed sprang up in his cell he saw the tiny plant 
swell into the stature of a tree: tropical birds sang in its branches; 
flowers grew over its roots; children were grateful for its shade; 
storms moved toward it from the distant snow-capped moun- 
tains. Imagination enlarged that little plant until it became a 
forest, and widened the prisoner's cell into a universe. Without 
imagination no man can become a preacher, and this divine gift 
was David Swing's. By it he stripped off the hull of dogma and 
found the sweet kernel. With it he explained riddles. It 
helped him exalt life's commonplaces. Under its touch moral 
principles that were dead and uninviting became as dry roots, 
smitten in summer into fruit and beauty. This pre-eminent 
faculty in him turned his sermons into moral poems, pictures, 
gardens, landscapes. Therefore, also, Dr. Barrows' words: 'If 
that which is keyed to universal truth is not to be outgrown, 
why should not men and women read for the generations the 
thoughts of David Swing ?' 

And you who heard him here know that he was a sublime 
optimist. He believed in the triumph of goodness. Pessimism 
seemed to him a form of vulgar atheism. He saw God abroad 
everywhere leavening society as yeast. Growth was the spirit 
of the ages and the genius of the universe. Looking backward 

34 



DAVID SWING 



he saw all creation set forth upon an upward march. The stars 
revolved. The dead crust of the earth rose up into conscious 
life. The vegetable kingdom stood erect and drew near to the 
animal realm. 'The very beasts felt something stirring in them, 
and journeyed upward. Man, too, as if he heard the music 
drowsily and afar off, joined the strange procession and moved 
upward also.' Afar off he perceived the extinction of ignorance 
and sin, and the triumph of goodness. That he was not impa- 
tient of the slowness of social progress argues his greatness. Mr. 
Gladstone once said that the contentment of the people was 
largely their blindness to a better way; that to-day's institutions 
are concessions made to ignorance and fear. When, therefore, 
we consider that the veil was lifted before his vision so that he 
saw a thousand wrongs that might be righted, a thousand abuses 
that might be wiped away, a thousand reforms that should to- 
day be achieved, we marvel at his patience, his buoyancy, his 
hopefulness, his optimism. But he stayed himself on God with 
whom 'a thousand years are but as one day.' 

When he saw the church journeying forward in an ox-cart, 
he foretold the day when man's heart and conscience should 
move forward with the speed and comfort with which his body 
travels. When he saw man dispirited with his own littleness, he 
whispered that eloquence and art came through great thoughts 
and themes; that Christianity's vision made Dante; that paradise 
made Milton; that a madonna made Raphael. And so he fed 
the hope that the greatness of Jesus Christ would repeat itself 
in each loving heart, even as the sun sets and repeats its colors 
in the sapphire and amethyst. When he saw men discouraged 
whose secret cry was 'no man careth for my soul,' who seemed 
like King Lear driven on in the night, with head white and un- 
covered before the storm, he pointed these discouraged ones to 
the golden clouds and the mountain peaks, and urged that above 
and beyond them was One whose footprints are on the hills, 
whose song is in the summer, whose bosom is love, whose face 
and presence will explain all our hard problems. 

And when at last he saw men standing about the open grave 
of falling statesmen, dying woman, sleeping child, he whispered 
that for Lincoln and Tennyson to continue beyond the grave is 
less wonderful than that they should enter the cradle; that the 
hero and the martyr and the beauteous mother are not journey- 
ing forward under the embrace of divine laws toward a black 

35 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

hole in the ground, but toward a door that opens into heaven; 
that a second life and a readjustment beyond is the only expla- 
nation of the death angel moving through our streets; that the 
Divine Form standing in the shadow behind man, the divine laws 
girding man about, the divine river that sweeps man's spirit on, 
the divine affection for dear ones, that strengthens as the body 
weakens, all these unite to feed the hope that beyond the grave 
there stand divine arms outreached, waiting to receive man's 
soul. 

Our friend once spake of William Pitt as the great commoner, 
because he dealt in the universal truths of liberty, even as science 
deals with universal propositions about land and sea and sky. 
Thus, in the realm of morals, David Swing laid all his emphasis 
upon the common-sense principles that are related to men, not 
as Protestants or Catholics, but to men as the children of God. 
He caused Christianity to stand forth as a simple single shaft. 
He saw that when a cathedral was mingled with booths and 
shops and ruined cottages, the grandeur of the temple was injured 
by surroundings that have in them no greatness. He saw that 
a mountain surrounded by foothills for hundreds of miles was 
obscured by its very complexity. Recalling St. Peter's, he re- 
membered that the architects were enemies, and that the artists 
quarreled bitterly. But the temple grew in grandeur because 
the columns and arches cast off the quarrels of human life. 
Rising into the sky it absorbed the genius and love of each ar- 
chitect, but left his strife and his chips to perish below. He saw 
that man seeking to explain the star or stone had been guilty of 
all manner of foolish, vaporing blunders. 

He also knew that the human mind working in the realm of 
theology had been similarly untrustworthy, oft maligning God, 
full oft bringing Christianity into contempt. Therefore he sought 
a simple religion. He confined himself to a common sense 
statement of universal principles. He saw that God made iron, 
but not tools; pigments, but not paintings; forests, but not furni- 
ture; reason and conscience, but not creeds and politics. But 
he saw also that thought determined deeds, and that right living 
comes out of sound thinking. And so, instead of beginning at 
the realm where we know least and working toward the known, 
he began with the realm where we know most, and worked 
toward the unknown. Therefore spake he of man and his 
divine possibilities, his social duties, his civil obligations, the 

36 



DAVID SWING 



development of his reason, the training of his taste and imagin- 
ation, the enrichment of affection, the culture of heart and con- 
science. Oft he gave the rambling vine a new support and 
pruned away the dead and leafless stalk. Many, misunderstand- 
ing this, shed bitter tears and filled the air with noise and strife. 
But he kept at his work, for he loved that vine as much as they, 
and pruned it that the multitudes might find beneath it their 
shade and shelter. He remembered that all the great ones of 
history stood forth in an 'alluring atmosphere of genius, truth, 
and beauty.' He knew that man could never worship a defec- 
tive God. Therefore he sought to cause God, as interpreted by 
Jesus Christ, to rise before men in such a holy and alluring form 
that each heart would ask the world to join in its anthem. Dur- 
ing his life he sometimes destroyed. But it was only destroying 
the flower that the fruit might swell, the bursting of the bark 
that the tree might grow. All his destroying was for the sake of 
saving. 

Our city's debt to him cannot be measured. Searching out 
the beginnings of our institutions, Bancroft says 'We can never 
disassociate our national greatness and our religious teachers.' 
Guizot said Luther made Germany. Choate believed that 
Calvin shaped the Swiss Republic. Macaulay found the springs 
of English literature in King James's version of the Bible. When 
Spurgeon died Mr. Gladstone was quoted as saying: 'This dis- 
senter did more for England than any statesman of his genera- 
tion.' The explanation is, all wealth and material greatness 
begin in the mental and moral life of the people. Things are 
first thoughts. The doing that makes commerce begins with the 
thinking that makes scholars. Tools, railways, cities, books, 
institutions, are but the inner life, crystallizing into material form. 
Wake up man's taste, and he paints pictures; wake up his reason, 
and he writes books; wake up his justice, and he works reforms; 
wake up his conscience, and he cleanses his city from abuses. 
The beginnings of national greatness are not in things without, 
but in citizens made fertile and rich in resource. 

Happy this city, that produced this man, and enjoyed his 
presence through this, the most plastic and strenuous period of 
its history. And happy the seer, to whom God gave so great 
opportunity! Ah, David Swing, David Swing! the memory of 
thy sweet reasonableness is upon us. Still is thy friendly pres- 
ence here like a gentle atmosphere. Oft thou didst charm the 

37 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

fever from our brain, the fear and anxiety from our heart. Full 
oft thou didst release us from thrall and doubt, seeking ever to 
make us citizens of God's universe. Thy tireless industry doth 
rebuke us, until, with the Athenian, we murmur: 'The trophies 
of Miltiades will not let us sleep.' Thy courage and thy hope- 
fulness do still inspire us, for as warriors of old flung their spears 
far into the hosts of the enemy, and by bravery didst reclaim 
them, so thou didst fling thy heart forward to 'the feet of the 
Eternal,' and in death found it again. Here and now we recall 
thine early struggles; the harsh winds that did assail thy bark; 
thy nights of study; the eager youth crowding about thee in that 
far-off college; the multitudes that for years flowed in hither with 
goings like the sound of many waters; the ideals thou didst have 
for this great city, for its libraries, its galleries, its museums, its 
homes, its people. To-day a sense of debt is upon us. For the 
great love we bear thee, we pledge ourselves anew to truth, toler- 
ation, and charity, to liberty, to fidelity to our deeper convictions, 
to the poor, to the slave and the savage, to Jesus Christ thy 
Savior, to God thy Father. May learning like thine abide ever 
in our libraries. May goodness like thine ever lend glory to all 
our chapels. May thy all-perceiving reason, thy all-judging 
reason, hallow our council chambers. May eloquence lend glory 
to our forum and pulpit. May heaven drop thy charmed gifts 
upon our children and our children's children, until all are 
Christians and patriots. And we will give thee gratitude and 
greet thee beyond. 

Newell Dwight Hillis. 



38 



ADMIRATION OF BEAUTY 



NATURE AND MAN 

It is not to be doubted that nature is slowly becoming 
an object of deeper love. John Ruskin says that Homer 
did not allude to the grass as being beautiful in itself, 
but as being something which the oxen delighted to eat. 
All through ancient literature there is allusion to the 
scenes and charms of nature, but what was once a gentle 
friendship on the part of man has become a more powerful 
passion. Language is more powerful in uttering science 
or history or mathematical ideas than it is in describing 
the emotions which nature awakens. Often when friends 
have looked long and lovingly at a sunset they at last turn 
away in silence, for there are no words that can give the 
full measurement of such a picture. If there is creeping 
over civilization a greater love of nature, that new emotion 
will not live and grow without working some good or ill 
in the character of our race. If the external world came 
from an infinite God it cannot be of a trifling quality. If, 
as one philosopher called it, it is the will of God expressed 
outwardly, it must possess much of the greatness of its 
author, for as the picture drawn by a painter contains the 
genius of the artist, so nature depicted thus by the Almighty 
must contain many of the divine attributes. If in the 
great spaces which separate the stars and in the number 
and bulk of stars we perceive the infinite power, so some 
part or trace of the Supreme Being must be present in the 
details of each of these many worlds. God could not be 
present in only the distance of the worlds from each other. 
The God of the stars must be the God of what is found 
on each star. It is therefore, a priori, probable that the 
sentiment which is now binding man to the external scene 
is a dignified and influential sentiment. 

It may almost be said that our period discovered the 

41 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

material world in all its vast unity and beauty. Among 
the many good and beautiful things which have come to 
humanity in the late generations must be counted the 
surface of the earth itself. It has come borne to us by 
painters, poets, and all writers. Great volumes of sciences 
have been made out of its facts and laws, and almost a 
new education made out of its parade of beauties. All 
the prodigies have vanished : the cyclops and harpies have 
become extinct in the islands of Ulysses; where iEneas 
once heard the bird caeleno utter wild prophecies the 
modern traveler hears only the little nightingale sing; and 
where the hyperborean once dwelt we find now the Lap- 
lander traveling the snow with his sledge. A vast entangle- 
ment has passed away, and instead have come a unity and 
a realism which have made man a reasoner and a student, 
full of childlike simplicity. 

One of the most remarkable results of material sciences 
upon the mind is the strengthening of man's hold upon 
the law of cause and effect. Our statesmen attempt to 
find footing upon that law; there the inventors stand, and 
there more than formerly Christianity bases many of its 
doctrines and promises. It says faith in Christ will save 
you, because you will imitate the being whom you love 
and trust ; you will be taught and inflamed by such a divine 
companion. Faith becomes a law of education, and as 
rain and sun minister to the needs of a plant and make it 
grow and bloom, thus faith in Jesus ministers to the needs 
of the human heart. Many of the Christian doctrines 
have been transformed into natural laws, which instead of 
working for plants work for man's soul. Instead of 
speaking of rationalizing religion, the term ' naturalizing ' 
would express the new fact just as well. Religion and 
nature are made the parts of one plan. The student of 
nature is also the student of theology. 

The new love of nature is making our whole community 
the students of cause and effect, the citizens of one great 
empire — the children of a reasonable and infinite God. 

42 



NATURE AND MAN 



The fact that we do not know where natural law begins 
and ends does not prevent us from possessing and enjoying 
a vast kingdom in which reason reigns and triumphs in 
matchless beauty. Recently, when an ocean steamer was 
crossing the sea its shaft broke and pounded a hole in the 
bottom of the ship. The ship began to sink. Seven hun- 
dred passengers engaged in prayer, and the ship was saved. 
A well-known evangelist led the prayer-meeting, and says 
the saving of that vessel was the most wonderful answer 
of prayer the world ever knew. Instead of detracting 
from the religious faith of that hour one would better add 
to it all those prayers of long ago, asking that God would 
encompass his people with wisdom, and make light to 
run to and fro all over the world. Under that ship lay all 
the prayers for education and human progress which had 
been breathed for a hundred years. God had answered 
these old prayers by giving men deeper wisdom. 

The ship had by wisdom been built in compartments, 
and thus one compartment became full of water without 
endangering human life. Many of the prayers which 
saved that ship had been offered up in the sinking palaces 
of former days, and in those colleges where students of 
nature and science prayed for light. We must all offer 
the prayer of thanksgiving that God grants the wisdom 
of nature to all minds which truly seek it, and we must 
join the prayers of religion with the answers found in the 
later sciences. It is evident that if the ship had not been 
built in compartments it would have gone down. The 
prayers of the passengers in such peril must be made up 
in part of thanksgiving for that unfolding of nature which 
gave mankind the naval architecture now found on the 
high seas. If man is a child of God, so nature is a child 
of the same Father, and the laws of prayer must work in 
harmony with the laws of the great ocean. We must 
thank heaven that it gave man sense enough to build a 
compartment ship. 

Nature is thus seen as the medium through which flows 

43 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

much of the divine goodness. In God, indeed, we live, 
move, and have our being, but God is Himself contained 
in nature. Nature is God's presence, His body, His 
house, His soul, and in that strange incarnation and habil- 
iment we all pass our life. There we live and move. 
When we pray for daily bread the harvest field answers 
the prayer; when we pray for more of light, science is the 
answer; when we pray for more of education, the whole 
world comes with its supply; when we pray for more 
safety on the roads or the ocean, the laws of nature bring 
it ; when we pray for more of beauty, the springs redouble 
their beauty and the wild birds sing a sweeter song. 
There might come a time when we should pray that the 
ravens might bring us bread, but in the long career of the 
human family the prayer for daily bread finds answer in 
the fields of wheat and corn. In those fields Ruth the 
gleaner found her answer, and there the modern gleaners 
pick up their daily food. 

Nature is not only the home and form of God, but it 
is also His language, His words spoken to His children. 
It is the only language which all understand. When the 
thunder rolls we tremble, when the flowers bloom we 
smile, when the spring comes we hear the invitation to 
plant, to sow; when the harvest opens we are invited to a 
feast; when the cheek is red and the eye bright it is God 
saying to that being, You are young. When the silver 
hair comes, then come the words from nature, You are 
much nearer the end. These words few misunderstand. 

The human family makes use of one thousand 
languages. The more barbarous a continent the more 
numerous are its tongues. Each island in all the oceans 
has its dialect of terms. From amid this confusion of 
tongues forth comes nature with an eloquence which 
reaches the understanding of all who live. Its words are 
more powerful than those of the orator, sweeter often 
than those of the poet. Utterance so high, so deep, so 
rich! It must be the mighty language of the Infinite! 

44 



N A TURE AND MAN 



Do not say God has never spoken to you! Compared 
with His whispering, the dearest friends have been silent. 
The moment a soul expands enough to love beauty it 
begins to talk of the external world. In all the masters of 
literature, the beauties of nature are the decorations of 
each immortal work. Not only Shakespeare, but all the 
authors of high genius, knew 

' . . . . a bank where wild thyme blows; 
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, 
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine; 
With sweet musk roses and with eglantine.' 

Take the external world from Goethe, and what a deep 
injury you have done his verse! Take the material world 
from Tennyson, and his books lie in ruins. When the 
German poet was dying he asked that the curtains of the 
window might be opened that he might, to the last, feed 
upon the beautiful sunlight; when the English poet was 
passing away his family put out the lights man had in- 
vented, that the noble lover of all the heavenly bodies 
might lie on his pillow with the blessed moon shining on 
his face. Thus the nature which so educates our men of 
genius ought to stand beside them when they die. Hav- 
ing made the soul, nature ought to be near it when it goes 
hence. She ought to offer her chariot for the trip from 
dust to paradise. 

Out of nature comes the first and great lessons of art. 
When not a direct teacher she is an inspiration. All her 
immensity, all her millions of long-lived stars, all her 
brilliant days and softened nights, her clouds, her shadows, 
all her oceans with storm and calm, all those forests 
which have waved in northern pine and southern palm, 
all the flowers which have budded and faded, all the moun- 
tains which have hurled an avalanche or been smitten 
by the artillery of the sky — have combined to give man 
lessons in art which, in life or in immortality, he can never 
forget. The influence of nature does not end here. It 
goes so far as to simplify his style in art, literature and 

45 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

life. How simple is a tree ! or a mountain, or an ocean ! 
Each object is seen and loved in an instant. So in art. 
How simple are the few masterpieces in painting! But 
the simpler they are the more thought and feeling they 
awaken. The myths and legends, which once entertained 
and bewildered, have been displaced by the simpler truth 
and taste of our new epoch. Literature uses a simpler 
diction, and the obscure metaphysics of the schoolmen 
bids fair to perish. 

God, the measureless, is always inhabiting all space. 
He comes to man through all the laws and beauties of 
nature. Nature is His home, it is His language. From 
the human experience on earth man elaborates Ins morals. 
From long experience man picks up the virtues as gems 
and pearls on the shore of life's sea; he writes his Bible 
from the lives which have been lived by the best of all 
souls; he condenses emotions into hymns, and at last makes 
love and faith burst forth into prayer. The ages which 
have not known and loved nature have, for the most 
part, reached a bombastic style in language and a fanciful 
form in manners and dress. Nature is the teacher and 
example of simplicity. She does not like many or long 
words. 'The tree dies,' 'the bud opens,' 'the sun shines,' 
'the birds sing,' 'man laughs,' 'man cries,' are the phrases 
nature most loves. For reasons no one can give, nature 
is on the side of most of meaning in the fewest words. 
What is called realism in literature and art would be the 
glory of our age should it portray simply the beauties of 
man, and omit the worship of his depravity. This simple 
language, this simple art, must busy itself among the beau- 
tiful things of our world. Each was so made that man 
grows not only by what he can grasp of his surroundings, 
but also what he can pass by. Man lives not only eating 
and drinking, but also by what he can decline to eat or 
drink. True realism is not the ability to copy nature, 
but it is also the ability to find where vice has ruined 
nature, and has changed sweetness into infamy. Realism 

46 



NATURE AND MAN 



must not be a hunger which eats poison, but a hunger 
which waits for manna from the sky. 

Led by cause and effect, he concludes himself to be in 
the universe of a God. Ideas and emotions come to him 
one by one. The earth which gave food for his body 
gives food for his soul. The earth is man's school-house. 
From the structure of the school-house, from its places 
for study, from the lessons daily assigned, from the growth 
of those who attend faithfully the strange school, he infers 
the existence and constant presence of some schoolmas- 
ter, although the form be invisible. Wonderful school- 
house, in which nothing is invisible except the Master! 
What maps! what pictures! what lessons! what progress! 
what prizes for high scholarship and noble conduct! 
What beautiful summers and winters for study ! What a 
school, the teacher alone being hidden from man's sight! 
But man's sight was given him that he might see his world, 
its objects, its beauties, the faces of his friends, but not 
given him that he might see the Infinite. Man should 
not ask to see his God. It should be enough for each heart 
that it lives here and forever in Him. 



47 



WORSHIP IN THE BEAUTY OF 
HOLINESS 

It would be difficult to define the word ' worship. ' 
The heart comes to moments when it wishes to use that 
term, but not so often does it come to moments when it 
can define it. Probably it implies love of something 
much greater than man himself. The sublime is said to 
possess more of greatness and power than belongs to the 
common objects of beauty, and worship may be an at- 
tachment to some being that transcends all other life. 

Beauty is ascribed to a lily; sublimity to the midnight 
sky, or to the sea, or to the mountains. Thus love may 
sweep in a vast number of objects in our world, while 
worship may find a cause in only something above all com- 
mon life. 

The heart is affected by the object of its regard. When 
man stands before the blossoming orchard his heart is 
delighted indeed, but his feeling is not that which comes 
over him when he is watching a great red sunset. There 
are a hundred feelings for a hundred objects. As the 
being of God rises forth amid all other ideas and things, 
it awakens its own form of human sentiment. We call 
the feeling ' worship, ' and can proceed no further in an 
analysis of the word. 

Just as beauty is a part of sublimity, is akin to it, wor- 
ship is attended by emotions that are near of kin. Love, 
admiration, are near relatives of worship, and possess 
in a humble form the virtues of their superior. If to 
worship God is of any value to man, it follows that all the 
kindred sentiments must bring to mankind some form of 
worth. Worship is a star that is attended by satellites — 
a sun in the midst of a system. 
48 



BEAUTY OF HOLINESS 

The value of worship does not accrue to the Deity, but 
to the worshiper. When the first offerings were made to 
a god, the mind that brought the gifts was still an infant. 

The human intellect had not yet wholly escaped the 
feeling that God needs something, some gift, something 
that we may call a sacrifice. We do not sufficiently realize 
that everything is His, and that it is only egotism in us to 
offer to the Deity what was His before we made the offer. 

A Greek general made a vow that if his god would 
help him win a certain battle, he would offer to that god 
as many kids as there were enemies left dead upon the 
field. When Solomon dedicated his temple he offered to 
the Lord twenty-two thousand oxen and one hundred and 
twenty thousand sheep, it not then being even imagined 
that all those animals were the Lord's before Solomon 
had killed them; the oxen and sheep would please God 
better when they were roaming in peace on the green 
hills. 

May we not say that worship is for the worshiper. It 
is the human heart expressing itself, and there rising on 
this utterance to some higher feeling and higher thought. 
As a father, friend or savior, God wants His children's 
love and hymns and prayer, but we must need them more 
than God needs them, for He is so rich, and we are so 
poor. We rear an altar to Him, but it is in reality for our 
own hearts, they so deeply need all those rich feelings that 
accompany the flowers and the hymns and prayers. 

When the fire-worshipers offered their love and adora- 
tion to the sun they conferred no joy or quality upon the 
sun himself, but they drank in many of the wonders of 
their world. 

Emerging from Zoroaster, they spread out into mil- 
lions, even before Plato came to the world. Encompassed 
by the light and the beautiful flames of fire, all the results 
of their worship were treasured up in the human side of the 
service. The sun grew no brighter on Zoroaster's account. 
All the worship of his hosts did not make the sun paint 
49 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

the roses of Persia in any more of beauty, or add any- 
thing to the odors of Arabia, but the human foot learned 
to step more tenderly upon the grass. The mind was 
wide and free as the sunbeams, woman was not a slave, 
little children were loved, the table was spread with rich- 
ness, the home was a sun-bright spot. Thus the altar 
dedicated to the sun was most sacred to the human heart; 
the incense that seemed to rise to heaven did not, indeed, 
go away from the soul. 

When we pass from the sun over to the Christian's 
God, we see that our Creator is too infinite to need any- 
thing from our hands, and that our worship empties its 
wealth upon the worshiper. 

If God commands us all to worship Him, the command 
is for our sakes. We have a mind and heart to be made 
and molded, and if man can ever be great he must be- 
come such by worshiping great things. He must stay 
near the altars that he may himself become more divine. 

We seem coming to an age when all the admiration 
and reverence each heart may cherish for the Son of Man 
will become a part of the heart's treasure. If we bless 
the noonday sun for his light, heat and beauty, we may 
have the light and the blessing. The sun is too great to 
need them. 

If man loves the Christian Savior, that love will enter 
into the human soul to become a part of its spiritual treas- 
ure. When the fire-worshipers adored the sun they did 
not know how vast he was; that he was a million miles in 
diameter, and could cheer a thousand planets as easily 
as he illuminated this one world. Although unmeasured, 
that flaming orb poured his light upon humanity, and 
made the four seasons and all the life and beauty of the 
globe. It was enough for the heart. Those children of 
Zoroaster did not worship as astronomers, but as lovers 
of sunbeams. When the heart thinks of Christ it need 
not act only as a heart full to the brim of worship or love 
or admiration. The surprise ends at last in the new 
50 



BEAUTY OF HOLINESS 

truth, that the soul can love a sunbeam without knowing 
the diameter of the sun. 

Worship is the name of the deed when the human mind 
goes to a great school. It rises above all common sur- 
roundings that it may be for the hour with God. The 
father does not need the child so much as the child needs 
the father. Man needs the vision of immensity. His 
heart needs to hear the solemn music of the universe. In 
his mortality he needs to draw near the source of ever- 
lasting life. In his weakness he needs to think of a will 
and power that can make a million stars wander in space, 
or can make common ground turn into blossoms. In his 
chaos of little things, man needs some being in whom 
taking refuge he can feel the presence of an everlasting 
harmony; of peace beyond peace, and joy beyond joy. 
If any one can not personally feel such need, he must con- 
fess that minds which have felt these needs have written, 
spoken, and acted for the human family. Great wor- 
shiping souls have atoned for the infidelity of the crowd. 
If not from our own worship, then from other hearts' 
altars has come much of the beauty of our race. 

Note the vastness of that spiritual fortune that comes 
through the heart. Literature is composed almost wholly 
of what the heart loves and admires. As the painter 
paints for the sentiments, the sculptor carves what society 
loves ; as music works wholly for man's delight and tears, 
so literature utters all its eloquence to the heart. You 
would not designate the algebra and the law reports as 
literature; you would not class as letters the debates 
on tariff or silver. 

At the mention of the word ' literature, ' human lif e in 
sadness or joy comes before us: Helen of Troy poses in 
gracefulness; Andromache and her child part with Hector; 
the plumed Achilles hurries along in his chariot; the 
woods whisper; the nightingale sings; Dante and Beatrice 
appear; Hamlet acts his part; Ophelia dies; Paul and 
Virginia make of Mauritius a paradise and a grave; 'Lit- 
51 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

tie Dorrit' is the beautiful dove of a prison; Fantine 
sleeps in a hillock which soft rain levels and flowers con- 
ceal. Literature is not learning. It is man's holiest 
passion. It is the soul rushing out of the holy of holies. 

Man is made great by the sentiments. Touch litera- 
ture anywhere, and the human face flushes. The strings 
of that instrument called 'letters' are fastened to the 
heart. Therefore, literature is that thing of prose or 
poetry that awakens the sentiments of the human race. 

Through the heart's gates all the arts and literature 
make their entry into human life; through those gates the 
worship of God comes, akin to literature but higher, 
akin to music but more sublime. Worship should no 
more be the result of fear than the love of the arts is the 
result of fear. As man loves music because it is music, 
so he should worship God because of the beauty of God. 

Perhaps we are coming to an age of worship rather 
than of theology. It is easy to imagine a period in which 
the Old Testament and the New Testament will empty 
all their holy and beautiful things into the public heart. 
If any mind shall not love all the holy books let it take a 
part, as Linnaeus did not espouse the earth's rocks and 
waters, but only its plants. If one can admire Paul let 
him read after Saint John. If worship declines at some 
one spot, it will rise on some other page, as we are often 
unmoved by the great ocean, but can cry at the voice of 
a song, or sit down in deep joy in the leafy woods. One 
thing is essential — to find some path in which the foot can 
always advance with reverence; for reverence, worship, 
admiration, are the mighty educators of our race. 

It is said of some eastern nation, that if a guest admires 
anything in the home of the host the host must give that 
object to the guest. It would be cruel to send the guest 
home with longing but empty hands. What is thus told 
in fancy of some unhistoric state may be told in truth of 
man's greater world, for what he worships is instantly his. 

Admiration, worship, is possession. Man cries out, 

52 



BEAUTY OF HOLINESS 

'I admire the sun and the stars!' Henceforth they are 
his. Nothing can separate them from his heart. He 
admires music. Ever afterward it is in him, of him, and 
for him. They are inseparable. Man is God's guest. 
God gives him what he worships in the infinite house. 
Worship is not for God, it is for man. We are in God's 
home. He says what you love is yours. 

It is the custom of logic to reason from the lower to the 
higher, but it is often fitting to argue downward from the 
higher postulate. From the worship of God pass down 
that admiration of beauty which so fills our age. As 
worship enchains man to his Maker and detains him until 
he is ennobled by so great an association, so all this lower 
admiration of beautiful things flings back some rich 
coloring upon the admiring mind. It would be a blessed 
hope for our youth if they could always have open to 
them some beautiful gateway. No school-house will ever 
open like the school of the sentiments. The worshiper 
becomes like his God. 

When the modern critics in the church and out of 
it are enlarging upon the mistakes and upon the 
historical childishness of the Bible, they should not 
forget to tell us that there ran through the whole 
Bible period a something that was no mistake, a some- 
thing whose history rises up before us as real as the 
earth itself, and as beautiful as its four seasons, as mag- 
nificent as its June. That something was worship! The- 
ology came and went; the laws of Moses were passed, 
obeyed and repealed ; fables were told and forgotten ; Paul 
and Apollos differed; James and John were unlike — but 
in worship all seemed to meet, and the Jacob who saw 
angels on the night-ladder is beautifully akin to St. John 
and Paul, and all are wonderfully akin to our age that 
sings the one hymn of the whole race, 

' Nearer, my God, to Thee.' 

In days of universal complaint and unrest, the heart 

53 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

need not be empty of good and peace. The worship 
of God is an unfading flower. It cares no more for 
human theology than the skylark cares about the size 
and distance of the sun. Behold the unchanging good- 
ness of God ! The leaves have come back to the forests. 
Trees a thousand years old are bedecked again in verdure. 
The roses that bloomed for Anacreon have come back for 
us. The olive trees that wove a shade for Christ are in 
our world still. The carpet of flowers and grass is spread 
upon America again. It was unrolled before the feet of 
Washington, and now it is unrolled for us. The worship 
of God need meet with no end or decline in the human 
heart. It is a lifelong beauty and a lifelong happiness. 
Joy is the flower of love, and the more infinite the affec- 
tion, the more perfect the soul's peace. Life will be full 
to overflowing to the heart that is a worshiper. 



54 



THE OUTDOOR AGE 

One of the best books from a learned German writer 
of philosophic fiction is called ' Homo Sum. ' It is aimed 
against that old and still existing effort to set up an antag- 
onism between the soul and the world. Out of the old 
idea that God cursed the whole earth because of Adam's 
sin resulted a belief that to despise the world was the first 
duty of virtue. By some means the same idea made an 
early entry into pagan ethics and customs, and in the 
practice of contempt for all earthly things the pagans out- 
did the Christians. In many parts of India virtue and 
religion are still measured by the atrocities man can com- 
mit upon his own body. The more deformed the body 
the more perfect the soul. 

The book, ' Homo Sum, ' was a plea for all of God's 
world, as being also man's world. T am a human 
being, ' and, therefore, light and sound and perfumes, day 
and night, land and sky and water, friendship, love, ambi- 
tion, and happiness are for me. 

Why should man have been placed on a planet that 
was not for him ? If we could conceive of a fish as be- 
coming the victim of a philosophy which should teach it 
that its highest aim should be to keep out of the water, 
that the less use made of water the nobler the fish, we 
should possess then a good illustration of the Christian 
doctrine of despising the world. Or, if we could conceive 
of the birds as passing a law that the more a bird should 
walk and the less it should fly the better for its intellect, 
we should again be able to estimate the folly of all the 
human contempt for the earth. In that book, 'I am 
a human being, ' a self-made and most miserable hermit 
was compelled to go down the mountain-side each day to 
carry from a little spring a jug of water in which to soften 
55 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

some crust of bread. Could the poor fanatic have dis- 
pensed with the crust and the water, he would have done 
so, but even great virtue can flourish best in a body that 
is not dead, and so to find water the hermit had to go 
down to a spring. At last, as he came down from his 
cave to the spring, a child came up from the rich valley 
below, and there death met life; there groans met laugh- 
ter; there the wrinkled forehead met a beautiful face; there 
a withered heart met a heart full to the brim of realities 
and hopes. The philosophy of the child was the stronger, 
and after months of logical meditation the fanatic broke 
away from his cavern and made a friend out of the many- 
sided planet. The only necessary thing is that the hermit 
who abandons his cavern and the child that meets him 
at the fountain must be lovers of what is right and good. 
They must not be animals or barbarians. They must 
say in the highest of all senses, ' I am a human being. ' 

'There is a natural body,' and there is a spiritual 
body. The natural is the first one, and afterward comes 
the spiritual. And so Paul might have said that there is 
also a natural and earthly soul, and that it must slowly 
work its way toward a higher state. But to trample upon 
earth's flowers is no part of this progress. Shutting out 
the world is of the same import as putting out the eyes. 
Man has no more right to destroy the objects to be seen 
than he has to put out the eye that sees them. In some 
parts of India women live in houses whose windows do 
not open to the outside world, but only into a little court. 
It is harmful for them to see the sunrise, or sunset, or to 
see the objects of street or field. If the natural world of 
these women is thus taken away, how can any spiritual 
world ever come? It has never come to one of them. 
They are mere infants in intellect, and in all the forms of 
power. 

Our part of the world stands nearer the ideal path of 
duty, for the great outdoor life and philosophy are the 
preliminaries to the highest form of man as a spiritual 
56 



AN OUTDOOR AGE 



being. As man's language came from sensible events 
and images, and at last became spiritualized, as man's 
religion began in material conceptions and thus pro- 
ceeded toward the spiritual, thus man himself may make 
the natural become a bridge, or a chariot, or a ship to 
carry him over the space between the earthly and the 
divine. 

It is well known with what enthusiasm our little chil- 
dren play with the materials of our world. The spiritual 
does not come first. The heap of sand, the pond of water, 
the little wagon, the cart, the fields, the trees, reach them 
long in advance of any of the spiritual ideas. In the 
New Testament the children are seen as playing funeral 
long before they had any conception of the certainty and 
sadness of death. Thus man meets the whole natural 
world long before he can reach or reveal a high spiritual 
nature. His earth precedes his paradise. It precedes, 
not by accident, but to make it. Earth is the cradle and 
youth of the soul. 

America is the great outdoor nation passing along in 
an outdoor century. Our politics, our religion, our 
ethics, are all busy, not over the ideas that once enter- 
tained the wise men of all times and places, but over those 
that pertain to man as related to other men and as related 
to the public welfare. All the millions of India have 
always looked in upon the hidden soul. The roving wise 
men have asked the poor myriads to look into the mind 
and mark its likeness to Nirvana and its tendency thither- 
ward. The external scene was forgotten. Those count- 
less millions have done little but study death, transmigra- 
tion, and annihilation. 

In all these centuries manhood and womanhood made 
no progress, because they were not looking at themselves 
in reality, but only at some strange panorama made by 
an inventor. Suppose a child were reared in perfect 
seclusion and was permitted to read no book but the 
'Arabian Nights'; would not that child soon expect his 

57 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

house to have come from rubbing an old lamp? Would 
he not expect secret doors to open at the word, ' Sesame, ' 
and disclose him caverns of gold ? Thus India was 
secluded and educated, and when its millions looked any- 
where they looked into the mind to note the working of its 
wheels. 

The Christian dispensation was much less wedded to 
these internal fancies. It came in part from Jews, Greeks, 
and Romans, and was born with some sympathy for man, 
as related to earth. Compared with the far East, the 
Hebrew nation was simple in doctrine and practice. If 
we compare the psalms of David with the Hindoo dream- 
ings, we find a most intelligible simplicity. When to this 
Hebrew common sense we add the Greek and Latin 
practical wisdom, we have a noble origin for our Christian- 
ity, and we find some promise of its great future. 

And yet our Christianity refused to take firm hold of 
the external scene. Its early scholars all turned toward 
the abstract and internal, and were fond of nothing so 
much as of making a survey of the mind and soul. 

Should we listen to Abelard in the twelfth century, we 
should find him reasoning wholly within the circle of un- 
thinkable theology. He was learned, eloquent, acute, 
and poetic, but his thoughts and writings all related to the 
nature of God, of the trinity, or the human mind. The 
people flocked to hear him as our multitudes flock to hear 
Webster or Clay, Gladstone or Castelar. When Abelard, 
worn out by labors and calamity, fled to a remote woods 
to live the life of a hermit, he awoke one morning to find 
hundreds of students from Paris pitching tents around 
him under the trees. They had brought tents and food 
that they might again hear the old stream of eloquence. 
They were students of philosophy, and they wanted to 
hear more about the Holy Ghost and man's intellect. 
Of this strange period orthodox Romanism and Protes- 
tantism still contain many a trace. 

Our age may be called the first great outdoor period 

58 



AN OUTDOOR AGE 



that ever dawned. This condition is not wholly one of 
peace. It is full of unrest. The questions of protection 
or free trade, of gold or silver or paper money, of suffrage, 
of labor and capital, of ownership of land, of traffic in 
distilled drinks, of education, of municipal governments, 
are all too many and too practical to create repose for the 
million. All that the old millions asked was that some 
teacher would pass along and say something to them 
about God and the soul. In parts of India to-day, when 
a wise man passes through the streets, the people flock 
around him that they may hear over again, some dear 
old words about the mind and the soul, as before death 
and after. Those words being spoken, the people take 
up the external world as they took it up two thousand 
years ago. The field, the shop, the home, the citizen, 
the husband, the wife, are out of the world of reflection. 
The people hear once more about the soul, and their 
philosopher takes a sacred bath. 

Religion has become simplified, because the age asks of 
religion what it asks of the tariff, and of gold and silver — 
its relations to daily life. As modern thought asks, what 
are the relations of the railway to society, thus it asks for 
the import of morals and piety. 

The students of Paris that encamped in the woods 
around Abelard had never heard an utterance about 
capital and labor, or about the meaning of money or land ; 
what they loved was the ability of their master to bring 
the logic of Aristotle to bear against some scholar who had 
said something about a spirit, or about eternity, or a free 
or non-free will. All these new religions and ethical 
congresses spring from this new age, which is estimating 
with care and an infinite love all the sides of human 
welfare. 

As a great orchestra is constantly tuning its instru- 
ments, that its music may be the more delicately perfect, 
so modern thought is attempting to tune the great assem- 
blage of human hearts. Nothing is of any value except 

59 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

the good of humanity. The earth is a harp for the human 
hand to touch. 

All this external philosophy is yet new. The human 
mind has been kept away from the earth for many thou- 
sands of years. The church and state in the past have 
never permitted the mind to ask anything about money, 
industry, trade, the farm, the home, the rights of man or 
woman, the rights of corporations, or the right to hold 
land. Millions of acres can go to one person, and mil- 
lions of money to one name. Never was an age so over- 
whelmed with enigmas. The past has collapsed. It 
was built upon sand, and great is the fall of it. We are 
asked to hasten and make a wholly new world. The 
past has glided down upon us like an Alpine avalanche. 
We must clear it away and rebuild on a spot where no 
avalanche can come. But all this rebuilding must be 
done by the men of the most learning and the most honor. 

All these questions relate to the natural body, and out 
of their solution comes the spiritual body and soul. It 
is with civilization as with the mind. As the soul demands 
that the natural body shall be strong, its eye bright, its 
hearing acute, its foot strong for standing or marching, 
its brain large, its food temperate, its drink healthy, its 
heart buoyant, its cheek pink, so humanity asks that its 
money, its industry, its form, its home, its trades, its arts, 
its social life, shall be the perfect body of the great public 
being. 

We all know there is something wrong in India, some- 
thing wrong in Africa, something wrong in Siberia and 
Russia, so we know that America offers to her millions a 
cup that contains some drop of poison. The anarchist 
offers a cup that is all poison. The destructive mobs 
are fresh from the ignorance of Europe, and can think 
only with guns and stones. They know nothing of the 
human world. They dream of free money for all, of 
free land for all, of carriages for all to ride in. Next to 
this dream comes the idea of killing the people and the 

60 



AN OUTDOOR AGE 



nations that may doubt these Arcadian sentiments. We 
all know there are defects in America, but the republic is 
too grand and too beautiful to be murdered. 

Religion, politics, and philosophy have left the 'den' 
and have gone out of doors to find the happiness of the 
human family. This 'happiness' is like a child lost in 
the woods, and dense and dark and full of wild beasts is 
that woods that lies between us and the far past. Modern 
thought and love will search its mountains and rocky 
ravines, and back will they come at last with the lost 
child smiling in their arms. 

It is evident that the greatest part of man is his soul, 
but the civilization the world needs must not be one that 
shall produce a few great souls, but it must be one that 
shall create a great society. We do not ask for an age 
that for each beautiful mind shall grow a million beggars, 
and a million drones. There is call for an outdoor 
philosophy that shall save the hundred, as well as the one. 
On the wide-spread wings of the natural, society must 
fly toward the spiritual. 

Happy age, in so far as it is working out a definition 
of money and of labor, so far as it is educating the people, 
so far as it is using the elements for its toil, so far as it is 
pleading for the universal right, so far as it is making 
religion a companion of a pure character, so far as it is 
making the people into a king and is transforming supreme 
wisdom into law, for all these external things are the chariot 
in which man rides toward his divine nature. Man will 
rise with his world. This new form of thought has helped 
build up around man a more infinite realm. It has 
created a riches like that of the 'Arabian Nights,' only 
a glory not imaginary, but real. It has not paused in 
definitions of money and labor, nor in machines and 
inventions. It has moved on, and has made the farm a 
thing of honor and joy; it has made the common home 
as sweet as a palace; it has made each square foot of 
nature rival the canvas of art; it has made the sighing of 
61 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

the wind a part of all music; it has made the sounds of 
nature all eloquent; it has made all the tints, from the 
violet to the rainbow, fall in joy upon the spirit. The 
kingdoms of color, sight, and sound have had their 
boundaries enlarged. Man is now the crowned king of a 
group of empires, each one greater than the conquered 
world of Alexander. Think of the kingdom of sound! 
Cowper says : 

' Some chord in unison with what we hear, 
Is touched within us and the heart replies. 
How soft the music of those village bells, 
Tolling at intervals upon the ear 
In cadence sweet! ' 

Oh happy day for religion and philosophy, when they 
broke away from the old pagan and Christian prison, and 
ran out of doors. They are coming back to man now 
with more of beauty and spirituality than he can hold in 
his heart. 

In the sublime philosophy of Jesus Christ, after man 
has spent seventy years in this scene, his soul is ready for 
transfer to some world more beautiful still. Were man 
not afraid of death, and not chained here by golden 
friendships, he would perhaps at last say: I am ready 
for a second, sweeter world. I have seen spring come 
seventy times; three score and ten times have I seen the 
green fields return; three score and ten times have I seen 
the harvest ripen; three score and ten times have I made 
the autumn leaves rustle with my foot, and have seen the 
birds fly away to where eternal spring abides. Why should 
not I also fly away ? Why not go to some external world 
a thousand times better — a new paradise that may pour 
a richer spirituality into the infinite urn of man's heart ? 



UTILITY AND BEAUTY 

It is very difficult to treat aright the theme of utility. 
There are many who look upon the word as standing for 
the opposite of beauty. The art-lovers and the pleasure- 
seekers have long made great sport of the men and women 
who have stood on what is called the practical side of 
society. A popular French writer confesses to a great 
contempt for the aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin. He 
mourns that Franklin should have told the young men of 
America how to save money and how to make money, 
and said that 'if a man will take care of the pennies, the 
pounds will take care of themselves. ' There is a general 
impression that the highest type of human nature must 
live in the clouds. There must be color, light, music, and 
poetry in the air. If this kind of humanity touches the 
ground there must be violets under foot. In the ' Lotus 
Eaters' Tennyson unwittingly describes a great mass of 
actual people. As art and all beauty grow, this crowd 
is liable to increase. It is not easy to harmonize the 
practical people of the world and the poetic, aesthetic 
multitude — the Franklins and the Angelos; but there can 
be no doubt that the whole race ought to meet in the 
prosecution of a true utility. 

It is not to be wondered at that the word 'beautiful' 
is compelled to play so great a part in the conversation 
and writings of the day. Useful things are often so full 
of adaptation, so full of human welfare, that it is not doing 
violence to language to call a locomotive beautiful. We 
are all unwilling to offend angels and Murillo by the re- 
mark, but when we see a vast engine hurrying a great 
train along the slope of the mountains or across the blos- 
soming prairies we must all feel that the great iron machine 
blends with the beauties of nature on either side of the 
63 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

road. The power, the swiftness, the endurance of this 
instrument are ideas which are in themselves very attract- 
ive. Niagara reveals power, it reveals long continuance, 
it tell us of the great forces of nature, it suggests much, 
and summoning up all these qualities we declare the 
cataract to be beautiful. If a heavy engine awakens the 
same sense of power, we do not hesitate to call the machine 
beautiful. The utility of the machine ought not to rob 
it of a single aesthetic laurel. The author of the universe 
does not seem to have been partial to simple beauty; He 
seems to have made a great entanglement of beauty and 
utility. 

When the railway men first began to cut down the hills 
of England, and to destroy the old lines and curves of 
English fields, John Ruskin mourned over the victory 
which money seemed to be winning over the taste which 
had come down from the long past. It is possible that 
time has softened the judgment of Mr. Ruskin, for time has 
covered the embankments and masonry with wild pop- 
pies, grass, and ivy, and has revealed the ability of the rail- 
way to carry great men to and fro rapidly; to carry a fam- 
ily in happy peace — the infirm great-grandmother and a 
group of descendants passing down in years through 
twenty to twelve to the little child of only one year in this 
world. All are borne along as in a home which can fly. 
The mind and heart can hold city and country both, and 
thus double their world. Language is thus made one 
for country and city. Each separate mind lives not in 
a little hamlet, but in a world. Great carloads of flowers, 
fresh from gardens fifty miles away, are distributed in 
London before the night dew has dried on the rose and 
the narcissus. When man begins to meditate over the 
money-making power of the railway he can make his re- 
flections end in the department of beauty. 

When Franklin urged the young men to take care of 
the pennies he must have had in mind all that those be- 
loved pennies would buy. We must measure his econ- 
64 



UTILITY AND BEAUTY 

omy by the kind of objects he had in his mind and heart. 
When he first set out from home he felt deeply the relations 
of money to a good meal and to a night in a bed, but when 
later and better years came, all his economy was only a 
philosophic method of reaching good results. One can- 
not but admire the money-saving power of youth which 
in middle life founded the public library at Philadelphia, 
and later toiled to found the university of his state. He 
touched society at all its great points. With his flying 
kite he touched its science, with his integrity he touched 
its morals and religion, with his love of knowledge he af- 
fected the education of this period, and with his political 
wisdom and ardent love of freedom he helped found a 
republic. Blessed, indeed, is that economy which pays 
the board-bills of such a wide-reaching soul. His maxims 
about money were based upon an intellect which thought 
slavery wicked, and New England rum vile. The maxims 
of poor Richard urged the age onward toward purity, 
temperance, industry, forgiveness, and all the virtues of 
which man is capable. The march of Napoleon over 
Europe is a painful picture in comparison with the peace- 
ful advance of Franklin over America. Now, when both 
scenes grow dim alike on the horizon, the richer colors 
are seen hanging over the home and fields and grave of 
the utilitarian. The man who aimed heavy cannons is 
eclipsed by the author of a people's almanac. 

Utility is the discovery of a good end of the best means 
to that end. It is a repudiation of all harmful and use- 
less labor and expenditure, not only that man may escape 
a vice, but that he may have time and means for prose- 
cuting some good. If a traveler has only a week in 
Jerusalem or Rome, he must visit only these objects 
which are most deeply marked by fame. Man, the in- 
dividual, is not to belong in this world. A few years, and 
he must go far away. Utility is the most profound study 
of a short life, that it may be made longest and greatest 
in its experience. When Horace said, 'See carpe diem,' 
65 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

make use of the present, it is to be feared that he was only 
talking to the pleasure-seekers of the declining Rome. 
Utility did not rule the world in the time of Horace. The 
educated mind did not attempt to make a brief existence 
vast in events, but rather made it full of the pleasure 
popular with gluttons and drunkards. Horace was highly 
endowed with poetic taste and with mental powers, but 
he had not that conception of utility which created 
the great men of our era, and which, indeed, created the 
entire western civilization. If we ask, What made Amer- 
ica? the answer can not be made in the word, beauty. 
Such an answer would lead us to wonder why Turkey, 
Italy, or Spain did not go in advance of the Franklins 
and make a great republic on the Mediterranean border. 
If beauty could make a great nation, great nations would 
grow wherever the beautiful might wave her graceful flag. 

The answer can not come in the word wealthy, for 
Mexico was rich in all her past years, and Spain and Peru, 
and, indeed, the Middle Ages were all rich in gold. If gold 
could make an America, St. Petersburg and Moscow would 
soon possess all the great attributes of the United States. 

As beauty and wealth did not create this western spec- 
tacle, so religion cannot stand as the reason of its exist- 
ence. Christianity is a sentiment. Under its emotion 
lies the vast fact of the Roman church, under its feelings 
millions have been murdered; under its flag hundreds of 
students and scholars have gone into retirement, and have 
limited life by cave or gloomy convent. It made Thomas 
a Kempis spend seventy years in solitude; it made Pascal 
wear a girdle of thorns. Religion never taught a single 
lesson of duty, never lifted up a single soul, or a state. It 
is an emotion, not a wisdom. Utility must interpret and 
guide religion. 

If beauty, wealth, or religion cannot find a nobler state 
then whence comes a great nation ? Each great country 
is formed by the play of utility upon all the emotions and 
impulses of mankind. 

66 



UTILITY AND BEAUTY 

When beauty contains some application to the higher 
wants of society, then it helps man. The nude in art has 
probably never aided humanity in the least along the 
path of any progress. It cannot propose a great aim, nor 
a good way of reaching that aim; it cannot awaken a 
nobler sentiment. The face of an Apollo, or a madonna, 
or a Christ may inspire and may make all the world seem 
nobler, but the old coarse realism cannot inspire a single 
person or a period. Society may forgive it, and thus es- 
tablish its own generosity, but it cannot possibly find in it 
any valuable form of sentiment. That kind of art came 
before the human mind had begun to dream of a spiritual 
beauty. In order to help society, art must contain the 
power to awaken what is best in the soul. Art itself when 
it deals in its greatest ideas, becomes so moral as to be 
akin to religion. The greatest eloquence is not always 
that which utters some new truth for the mind. It is 
often that speech which brings out what had long been 
within us, but had been silent in a deep, dreamless sleep. 
Art is a moral when it awakens the heart and makes 
it seem how religious it has long been. As our age is 
rapidly striking a vulgar realism out of its literature, so 
must it eliminate it from art. No beauty can stand if it 
be harmful. Society can not confess the existence of an 
injurious beauty. The utility which entered so largely 
into the composition of the Franklins and Stewart Mills 
and Cobdens and Brights must mark out the path of 
beauty. All true beauty must lead man onward. 

The true interpretation of life being that it is an effort 
along a great path to a great end, it remains that our poli- 
tics and our social customs and our religion must find the 
best path to the highest human welfare. The old politics 
is rapidly dying because it was too careless of usefulness. 
It could study the comfort of a few thousands, and leave 
the millions in infinite wretchedness. Despotism was full 
of decoration. It built in great magnificence, it carved 
and painted, it spread for the few 'a cloth of gold'; but 

67 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

humanity cannot live upon ornament alone. There must 
be some hand which can lead into the rich fields of edu- 
cation, morals, justice, and liberty. Monarchy is dying 
because the human family can no longer endure the ab- 
sence of all the things it most needs. To displace the 
absolute monarchy has come the government through the 
defined rights of a constitution. But what is a constitu- 
tion unless a grouping of great ends the whole people 
should reach through the least thorny paths ? 

What most perplexes the free nations is the difficulty 
of finding the best paths for the multitude. Some roads 
are open, wide, and visible, but some are so hidden that 
all the statesmen of the present age are still uncertain 
where the truth may be found. Although political insight 
fails at times, it has seen clearly enough, in the most of 
hours, to separate the American people from many a grief 
and send them along the highway of a great career. Of 
this great advance, utility has been the perpetual watch- 
word, and the same word must remain on the banner of 
the future. Men of thought, the new Franklins and new 
Jeffersons, must open this land again for a new study, 
and find for the whole people still better ways to still better 
ends. 

If the study of the beautiful is endless, there being 
always a greater theme and a greater artist, so will there 
always be a greater utility than the one which is now bless- 
ing the living generations. After John Stuart Mill had 
expressed fear that there would soon be no new tunes for 
voice or instrument, the German and English worlds 
burst forth into new music, and created a tidal wave of 
melody. It was as though the beautiful goddess of 
music desired to make the whole world smile at the phi- 
losopher. Students of our country need not fear that 
their lessons have come to an end, that usefulness has been 
bound; and the unhappy need not fear that wisdom has 
completed its task. Utility is just as infinite as music. 
Great pages are yet to be annexed to the laws of nations, 

68 



UTILITY AND BEAUTY 

and many existing laws are to be torn from the book of 
rights. It was possible for Germany and England to 
pour out upon their peoples a new flood of music, it is 
just as possible for those nations to plan for their millions 
a higher right and a nobler freedom. Indeed, the mor- 
row can easily become so glorious in right and liberty 
that to-day will seem, in the comparison, all beclouded 
with injustice. 

Along with utility in politics, moves utility in social 
and private life. Social life and the individual are under 
obligations to make all things harmonize with a good path 
to a good end. It ought to be a universal maxim that 
nothing which injures can be a pleasure. In the great 
economy of God or nature, all beauty and pleasure are 
to contain within them an element of usefulness. The 
flowers we admire for beauty are also useful because they 
exalt us. The music we hear relates us at once to a 
higher life. Man does not know how great is his soul 
until he has sat for an hour under the spell of some perfect 
music. It assures him that he is divine. His eyes fill 
with tears because his past was so quick to fade and his 
white hairs so impatient to come. While we listen, a full 
consciousness of the present blends with memory and hope, 
and the heart is full indeed. To hold one alone is enough, 
but to have all three worlds of truth and dream rushing 
into the heart at once — this is to be enlarged ; it is to have 
the heart wedded to the infinite. 

The fine arts are no fuller of beauty than of usefulness. 
Music would be the most useful of the arts could we only 
have it always near us to come at our call. Painting, 
sculpture, and architecture are always within reach. Man 
can build a gallery for his statues and paintings, but he 
can not thus ever make music his own. It is always carried 
about in some living soul. A Tennyson can leave behind 
his poetry, Thorwalsden and Canova can leave behind 
their impressive marbles, but a Jenny Lind can not leave 
behind her her song. Music would be the greatest of all 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

the arts did it not have the power to carry so much of its 
magnificence down into the grave. Thither man cannot 
follow it. Yet music rises up as against this great defect, 
and so reaches the whole world's heart, and reaches the 
human soul in so much of purity, that it does not fall short 
of being the greatest of all the ornaments of our earth. It 
helps lead the multitude along the great path to a great 
end. 

When one thinks of useful pleasures, or useful beauty, 
one becomes bewildered with the breadth and luxuriance 
of the scene. When from one city thousands fly in sum- 
mer to the woods, to the lakes, the seas, the fields, they 
fly not toward beauty alone, but toward personal gain. 
Like Franklin, they are saving the pennies which compose 
physical and mental power. While the solemn trees are 
waving over us, we know not which is the greater, their 
beauty or their usefulness. The fields, which are carpeted 
with grass and bowers, add health to man's cheek. But 
the majority of interjections are exhausted upon beauty, 
the rhapsodists not being aware that under the paths in 
the woods, under the long rambles of thinking men and 
romping children, lies that same utility which helps man 
found a noble republic. Utility, only another name for 
nature's love for humanity. When next the pines in the 
mountains make their rich night music over your couch, 
that couch which brings isolation from care and toil, do 
not fail to think of the utility that is interwoven in all that 
attractiveness of the pines. The breath of the pines is not 
only a delightful fragrance, it is life. Like the railway 
car, the pines carry us onward. 

The philosophy winch rules the state must regulate the 
conduct of the church. If the state and art, and even 
nature, is each full of human welfare, of such an end the 
church must be full, and the doctrines which were once 
abstract, or which were cruel, have already perished. 
The intellect which can read a state all through and 
through, can read a church as perfectly. Therefore, has 

70 



UTILITY AND BEAUTY 

it come to pass that the statesmen of Italy, France, and 
Spain have turned away from the church, because the 
utility, which was the basis of the new politics was held in 
contempt by the servant of the old forms of piety. When 
the state is founded upon reason and welfare, the church 
can no longer be founded upon folly. 

Christianity is betaking itself to the Sermon upon the 
Mount because there it meets with great paths to great 
ends. It there sees humanity in a wide thoroughfare 
which leads to a perfect human life. Nothing in our age 
is good or great unless it creates and exalts manhood 
and womanhood. God is glorified in the greatness of his 
race, and Christianity must measure itself by only the 
culture and happiness of the multitude. We are here to 
make a good world. Politics, art, and religion ask us if 
we are faithful to our task. 

The fine arts and music and literature, great as they 
are, are not the end and measure of a human life. The 
fact that society lives by political truth, social truth, reli- 
gious truth, and scientific truth, marks out for us the place 
for all the beautiful things. Were it not for music, we 
should five a less happy hfe; but were it not for agricul- 
ture, we should all die next summer. Painting is a de- 
lightful art, but were it not for political science, we should 
all be savages. Sometimes young people of an extreme 
style boast of taking no interest in the social sciences, they 
are so fond of music and society; but had not science 
come their music would now be a tom-tom, and their elite 
society a band of Indians. It takes utility to make a 
world, and beauty to adorn it. 

Neither is utility the aim and measure of human life. 
To live for politics or agriculture or social science alone 
is to commit a sin against nature. This is to use only one 
half of the soul. If we are to plow a furrow to grow 
bread, we ask to be permitted, while we plow, to hear the 
morning bird and to see the blossoming orchard. The 
plowman is to be greater than his furrow. As the girl 

71 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

must be greater than her music, so the farmer must be 
greater than his plow. The girl must reach up her hand 
and touch the realm of utility, and man must turn from 
his labor and visit the kingdom of beauty. To despise 
either social science or beautiful art is to pass through life 
with only one-half of a soul. Great buildings, made of 
iron and then adorned and shaped by art, stand as the 
symbols of man's life, for it must possess both delicacy 
and iron, plenty of high music, and the iron of deep 
thought. 

If utility is such a sublime watchword of life, what 
must be said of beauty ? In one respect it is the accom- 
paniment of man's career. It helps make a great career, 
and then sings sweet music all along the line of the human 
march. Soldiers march, indeed, to music, but the march 
is not on account of the music ; the music draws its mean- 
ing from the solemn tramping of the troops. How grand 
must have been the national hymns of 1776, when a vast 
republic, in all its infinite usefulness, lay at the end of a 
long, wide road. Often a great, useful soul is its own 
decoration. Many a statesman dresses plainly and acts 
simply because his relations to the state are all the embel- 
lishments he can wear. There is no place left for a color 
or a jewel. When we read the Sermon on the Mount we 
find no poetry, no rhymes, no imagination, no fine figures, 
but these are all rendered unnecessary by the silent majesty 
of the speaker and the yastness of His themes. The seam- 
less coat and the cheap sandals are forgotten as we listen 
to the speaker, and see before Him the anxious human 
multitude — those strange heirs of two worlds! With a 
high utility to rule humanity, and with that beauty around 
man which impels him only onward, the soul will itself 
become like that of Christ, beautiful, and life itself will be 
a supreme decoration. 



72 



TOIL AND REPOSE 

The contemplated forms of piety have all failed. 
Under them the mind itself has always failed. Our earth 
is industrial. It cannot be anything else without dying. 
There is no exception to the rule. The poet must toil, 
the painter toil, the musician toil, the child of science toil, 
the thinker and writer toil. As no heart is exempted from 
death, so is no mind exempted from toil. The law of 
labor rolls around us. Our heart is a ship on the wave, 
but the pagans reverse the basic law of the world and make 
repose a cardinal principle. By as much as a mind rises 
in that piety, by so much does it absolve itself of all action, 
and the lower classes are the slaves of the higher. A per- 
fect piety, there is a blissful idleness. Out of this comes 
the men of the tent and the mountain. God is repose, 
and therefore idleness is bliss. 

This was the doctrine that crossed over into Christianity 
and helped create the dark ages. When to reach any 
education and piety was a command to retire from the 
world, a deep cloud settled upon Europe, because all its 
scholars were in the cavern asleep, and not in the vineyard 
of God and man. A young genius said to an old monk: 

' Oh, where is peace for thou her paths hast trod.' 
' 'Tis found,' he said, ' in solitude and God.' 

The young man believed the voice, and lay hidden in a 
convent for more than seventy years. There the summers 
went over him unseen, there all friendships died, and his 
body went back to dust. 

As no art, or science, or philosophy, or good of any 

form is unattended by labor, so religion is not automatic. 

It is all to be worked out in the fields of humanity. Upon 

human life its words and tears must fall. Work does not 

73 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

end in doing; it makes man's being, and what he does he is. 
If he does deeds of love, he becomes himself love; if he 
daily acts, he becomes himself an actor. He who exerts 
force, becomes himself a power. The Orientalist becomes 
a calm sleep, the toiling intellect becomes a life. Man 
becomes a freeman by giving liberty; Lincoln became 
what he did and what he gave. Washington was created 
by his action. 

Certain elements crystallize and form the diamond, so 
human actions crystallize and make the soul. When the 
little girl learns to water the flowers, she waters her own 
heart ; and the summer time she makes for her garden she 
makes for herself. The happiness man gives away stays 
with him; the heart that loves the colored sunset will, long 
after nightfall, contain all the poured out gold. The 
clouds hold the sunset only for a few moments, but the 
gazing soul holds it forever. The sun that sets once in 
our sight, sets evermore in the soul. The human heart is 
the only true Brahma. What it does it is. It can truly 
say with the Brahma : 

' I am the blush of the morning, 

I am the evening breeze, 

I am the leaf's low murmur, 

I am the swelling seas.' 

Where man has been once, there he stays always. When 
we show humanity to a dumb brute, the dumb animal has 
blessed us, for it has made us humane. It has helped 
change a feeling into a powerful sentiment. Thus man's 
action is his own creation. At last doing becomes being, 
and thus the deeds of earth weave a character for immor- 
tality. 

The genius of Hindooism is repose ; the genius of Chris- 
tianity is action, and this tells us that it is the religion of 
the future. In that future, where cars are to run rapidly, 
where wheels are to spin and knit and weave and print, 
where every square inch of ground will yield a blossom 
or grass or grain, where woman will not live for fashion, 
74 



TOIL AND REPOSE 



but for life's action, where idleness will be deemed a dis- 
grace, and where daily beauty will be equaled by daily 
utility, there religion will be an action, and there will flour- 
ish the simple, Christ-like creed, for His life was love and 
worship in full activity. 

Christ was not an Orientalist. He was born where the 
Jews, Romans, and Greeks met. He seems now to have 
been a forerunner of our period, his labors were so inces- 
sant and so benevolent. He was not a hermit, not a simple 
negative, but only a divine mind and heart wedded to the 
highest philosophy of society. His teachings will fit the 
twentieth century as the sunshine will fit the hills and 
valleys. How that dear layer of light does silver all 
things, lake, field, tree, the human form ! Thus the words 
of Jesus fit the old and young, the men of all parties, the 
rich and the poor, and when the millions shall assemble 
in that hidden day, these words and that life will contain 
the spirit of the new and advanced intellect. The logic 
that fills the future with education and industry, cannot 
but pour into it the morals and genius of Christ. 

The truth is too great to be passed by, that the studies 
which made the sages of Greece and the power of the 
Latins repeated their natural actions in the youth of Jesus. 
When Christ began His public life He had been a student 
of mankind for more than twenty years. Socrates and his 
brilliant followers all confessed learning to be a refinement, 
the Latins repeated the maxim, one of them saying, 'It 
softens all manners, and will not permit man to be wild.' 

Such a truth was as well known in Judea as it was 
known in Athens, in Rome, so that no picture of Christ is 
complete which shall take away from the Son of Man 
those studies which engaged the highest minds of all the 
lands which surrounded Jerusalem. Out of that long 
meditation came at last all the beatitudes and that rule 
which has been called 'golden' in all the Christian period. 
Standing in the world of His Father, and reading all the 
duties and privileges of the earth, so cultivated that no 

75 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

wrong could escape His sensitive nature and no right 
escape His ardent love, He found it easy to say, 'My yoke 
is easy and my burden light.' Burdens remained, but 
wisdom and piety had lessened their number and their 
weight. He wept over Jerusalem, but He was lifted 
above all common minds by His ability to shed such tears. 
Blessed thought, that the people of the streets could not 
pass Him unloved ! Happy heart, that it was great enough 
to weep for a world ! 

The activity of man along good paths is the created ac- 
tivity of his God. If the Creator makes roses by means of 
earth and sunbeams, so he makes principles through the in- 
tellect of man and utters His love through the human heart. 
The activity of an age is the activity of God. The Chris- 
tian at least should feel that the action of the present is the 
motion of a flying world. We are all borne forward by a 
moving universe. Activity creates intelligence, intelli- 
gence creates sentiment, and sentiment expresses itself in 
love. If the activity of mind is amid act or learning, there 
the intelligence appears, and there the sentiment, and 
there the love of wisdom or beauty; but if the activity is 
amid human affairs, then there comes the intelligence, 
there the sentiment, there the passion. This is the order 
of sequence — an activity, then an intelligence, then a senti- 
ment, then a passion. Thus the whole human family is 
employed from age to age making the world of humanity. 
Our activity, our intelligence, our emotion, our passion, 
are yet in the morning of their great career. 

Seeing around us such a long movement forward of a 
planet and its race, we are justified in hoping that all the 
noble footsteps of man are the footsteps of his God, and 
are leading toward a time and a place where the work of 
creation will reach completion, and where all scenes will 
be beautiful, all sounds harmonious, and all rational life 
a rapture. 

No one knows what it is to live until one has reached 
the power to thank each little bird for singing ; each butter- 
76 



TOIL AND REPOSE 



fly for the down and the color on its wings; the power to 
thank each friend for a 'Good morning' ; each manly heart 
for its manly love; the rainbow for its arch; the sky for its 
blue; the violet for coming in the spring; the gentian for 
coming in the fall; the power to thank his country for its 
liberty and its progress; the beautiful for their beauty; the 
good for their goodness; the power deeply to bless the 
memory of the dead generations for what they did for us, 
their children ; to bless the names of the heroes and martyrs 
whose fears of long ago have been changed into our joy; 
the power to thank Jesus Christ for each step He took in 
Palestine, and for those words that compose our philos- 
ophy, and for the moral beauty that entranced our world. 
When the human heart thus bursts with thankfulness, 
then it is joy and heaven to live. 



77 



FAITH AND HAPPINESS 

If we note only the poets and the artists, we shall con- 
clude that man needs little else than the aesthetic sense; 
that all will be well if only the mind can appreciate the 
beautiful in music and in the varied scenery of nature; that 
sensibility and all culture are the great aims of life. So 
great is the part taken by this sensibility that it may easily 
seem to fill the whole sky. When the poets and artists 
marshal before us the woods, the hills, the blossoms, the 
oceans, the lakes, the cascades, and at last human faces, 
the most ideal, the heart says: 'Oh, beautiful world, thou 
fillest me with inexpressible joy! It is enough to be near 
thee ! I shall live near to thy wonders !' 

In our day there is a great awakening in this depart- 
ment of the mind — the department of beauty. The inter- 
nal sentiment has grown rapidly, and the external had 
been greatly increased in number. 

The man who uncovered the buried Ilium has become 
a partner of the Homer who made Ilium immortal. The 
present asks that all old splendor be brought back and 
that to it shall be added a vast volume of rich creations, 
wrought out by modern hands; from Greece, through 
Europe to the Pacific, humanity is asking for all beautiful 
things. 

When one is pondering over this wide revival of a senti- 
ment, the idea comes as a surprise that our world battles 
with us and contains enemies that must be overcome. It 
is amazing to be told that our victory over it is to be won 
by a religious belief. Have we not been led to believe 
that a sensibility to beauty was the chief end of man ? 
Does the world need anything of us more than the power 
of appreciation ? Is it true that there are foes to be fought 
and that our victory lies not in our tastes, but in our 

78 



FAITH AND HAPPINESS 

faith ? Is it true that man can not always sit by an open 
window which looks out upon blossoming vines, and which 
admits colors and perfume and music ? 

The story Mozart died while he was listening to the 
impressive requiem, almost leads to the belief that a harp- 
sicord contains the philosophy of a happy life and a happy 
death; but the fact is omitted that much of Mozart's 
music drew its sweetness from the worship of God, and 
that the requiem itself was a structure which reposed 
wholly upon the Christian's faith. Instead of being an 
end, beauty acted only as language for man's trust in his 
Creator. If Mozart's music helped the sanctuary, the 
sanctuary helped the music. The church supplied the 
thoughts which genius expressed in melody. 

Man's world is singular in that it is marked all over with 
alternate lines of magnificence and misfortune. Our sins 
are as great as our arts. We are all walking along toward 
happiness and pain. It is a question of debate with many 
whether the sweet of human life equals its bitterness. 
Such is the world which faith can conquer. That serene 
trust can cast the discordant scenes into harmony. It 
overcomes the world. It has for many ages made millions 
of human hearts rise above sin and temptation, and has 
helped many millions, plunged into affliction, to find in the 
Heavenly Father a perfect peace. It is nothing less than a 
philosophy of human life. It so gathers up all things into 
the wisdom and power of the Deity that even death itself 
becomes a part of His beautiful plan. Poverty, disap- 
pointment, the loss of loved ones, the countless ill of time, 
are all flung into the great word, God! an urn which can 
hold all the tears of our race. Nothing is cruel, since a 
living God orders all things; nothing is crushing, since 
God is more powerful than man's adversity. There is no 
darkness which can equal God's light. 

In the economy of the Heavenly Father it is the morrow 
that is truly great. The present is only an hour; the mor- 
row is a great continent of time. A cloud may eclipse the 
79 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

hour, but the morrow cannot but contain an outpouring of 
sunshine. There is no cloud great enough to cover it. 
To-day is a rain-drop, to-morrow an ocean. 

No sentiment will so carry the soul beyond the dark 
present as a simple faith in God. It may well be called a 
victory. Its flag waves in the night. The poetic pen 
which tells us with what tears of joy the patriots looked 
out in the dawn and saw that their 'flag was still there,' 
wrote for the Christian as well as for the citizen; for what- 
ever be the night and battle, the faithful heart sees the 
flag of divine hope waving in the dawn of the morrow. 

Perhaps our age is working at a faith which will reach 
a greater multitude of minds, and weave for them a pro- 
founder peace. This we know, that our earth, with its 
race, having come from a God, it ought to be in Him and 
with Him and for Him. All of life ought to be good, be- 
cause it comes from so great an origin. According to Mr. 
Lowell, it remains glorious even in the seventieth year. 
Faith says that man is a soul with God for its friend. 

' But life is sweet though all that makes it sweet 
Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet. 

I muse upon the margin of the sea, 

Our common pathway to the new To Be; 
Watching the sails that lessen more and more 

Of good and beautiful embarked before. 
With bits of wreck I patch the sails that bear 

Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere. 
Whose friendly people's shore I sometimes see, 

By soft mirage uplifted, beckon me. 
Nor sadly hear, as lower sinks the sun, 

My moorings to the past snap one by one.' 

When the old saint said, 'This is our victory over the 
world, our Faith,' he was so encompassed by persecutions 
and cruel martyrdoms that what he needed most was a 
power that could lead the heart through great sorrows ; but 
this presence and goodness of the Infinite One do not any 
more lessen the evils of the world than enhance its good. 
The religious mind not only triumphs in dark hours, but 
80 



FAITH AND HAPPINESS 

it triumphs also in sunny days, for, all the sunbeams and 
grasses, blossoms and harvests, are beautified by the 
thought that they come from a supreme wisdom and be- 
nevolence. Not only does man need faith when he is in 
the vale of misfortune, but he needs it when he is standing 
in the vale of Chamouni or of Tempe, or the wilder valley 
of the Mississippi, for faith redoubles all the outpoured 
magnificence, and helps the mind with a victory over every 
beautiful sight, over sweet sound, every perfume. Height 
and depth become more sublime because they are the 
language of God. Thus Faith stands victor with not only 
all the sorrows of man, but all his joys at her feet. 



81 



GOD'S SPIRIT IN MAN 

The term 'inspiration' expressed for the Latin race 
the presence of God in man. God was as delicate as a 
breath, and He passed into man's soul only as the air 
moves between breathing lips. Virgil was fond of this 
idea. He pictured Apollo as passing like a breath into 
the great soul of the Sibyl, and as thus filling her spirit 
with a full picture of the future. Other gods entered 
other souls and started the flame of love, or patriotism, or 
wisdom, or goodness. Many of the classic poems and 
orations begin with the prayer that some god would lend 
his presence and his aid. Thus came the word and the 
idea into the Christian religion. God, the Almighty, 
breathed into some men his wisdom and might. It be- 
comes us, therefore, to think of a different kind of in- 
breathing — an influence which reaches an immense mul- 
titude, and reaches them now. We wish to live now in 
the midst of inspired men. 

The modem form of this mental condition is an elevation 
of mind and heart — an uprising such as ought to follow 
should a god dwell in the soul. A mind may become so 
sensitive and intellectual that the world thrills it. It 
grasps the world. When the photographic process was 
first discovered, the person whose picture was to be taken 
had to sit before the camera a long time. Better materials 
and methods were discovered, and now the streaks of 
lightning on a cloud are caught as they run. The mind 
may be so awakened that it constantly perceives its world. 
It catches all objects. The old and the young, the high 
and the low, are pictured in the heart. The hills and 
valleys speak to it, and it hears. When the children play 
their image is instantly caught. The autumnal leaf, fall- 
ing before it, paints its picture on this strange canvas. 

82 



GOD'S SPIRIT IN MAN 

The lightning is not too quick for it. Before it the world 
marches in a procession long and brilliant. The minds that 
have reached this power are the inspired men of our age. 

Often an age has a thousand of such holy men full of 
the Holy Spirit, and then does the mental life run high. 
Often these gifted minds die more rapidly than they are 
born, and then the public soul droops and prays for better 
times. Then there is no one to show us our earth and 
our heaven. We are like the cripple in the Bible who lay 
on the bank of the miraculous water, but when the angel 
disturbed the water there was no one to put him in. We 
are in a worse state, for there are few angels to disturb 
the water. 

Did any of us ever see a wild swan or a wild goose 
slowly passing across the sky by day or night ? Not 
until Bryant watched the wandering bird. It flapped 
its slow, weary wings in vain until that one heart sung 
his touching melody: 

' Whither midst falling dew 
While glow the heavens with the last tints of day- 
Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue 

Thy solitary way ? ' 

The eight stanzas of Bryant take the navigating water- 
fowl from the pages of natural history, and hand it to 
the human reflection and love. 

When we read Derzhaven's 'Hymn to the Deity' we 
seem never to have thought of God before. Our cate- 
chisms did not make God near or alluring. Those books 
of the church did not awaken us, but along comes the 
Russian poet, and at his touch all of infinite space seems 
full of a grand hosanna. The stars sing together, and 
the suns seem lamps in the home of our Father. 

This song, added to Coleridge's 'Hymn in the Vale 
of Chamouni ' and Dante's 'Chariot of the Lord, ' can 
excel all the theologies of the world in the power to throw 
into our spirits the feeling that there is a God. The 
formal theologies may state a fact, but these statements 

83 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

are like stuffed birds in a museum. What would the 
skylark of Shelley be with sawdust in it in place of that 
up-flying, singing soul ? 

' In the golden lightning 

Of the sunken sun, 
O'er which clouds are brightening, 
Thou dost float and run, 
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.' 

Thus are there minds that can pour inspiration into 
other human souls, and thus raise the people heavenward. 

When we look back and find how empty the ancient 
world was of inventions and discoveries, note that Greece 
had no printing-press, no telegraph, no steam-cars, no 
electric lights, and, indeed, that none of these things had 
come in the time of Dante and Milton, it comes as a sur- 
prise that those times and places possessed such mental 
giants. The surprise ought to pass away when it is 
remembered that an inspired soul in the Greek world 
was richer than a saw-dust soul in the nineteenth century. 
Pliny the Younger bought farms a few miles apart that 
he might read and write in the slow chariot that went 
lumbering along the country roads. Such a mind with 
its note-book in the first Christian century was better than 
a nineteenth-century soul shouting through a telephone. 
The greatness of a man or an age comes from the quality 
of its inspiration. Demosthenes extracted more power 
from Greece than Aaron Burr drew from the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries. Dante drew more splendor 
from the Dark Age than Walt Whitman drew from this 
matchless period. The electric lights, the railways, the 
machines and the instruments have never made an art 
or a literature, or a high politics or an altar of prayer. 
Homer in his poverty and blindness was greater than all 
of them; he wrote a song that inspired the human race. 
What is greatest in our time, came to it from little Greece 
and little Palestine. Those things are of most value 
which most divinely inspire humanity. 

84 



GOD'S SPIRIT IN MAN 

It is a wonderful truth that our Christianity came up 
out of a being who had not anything of the material wealth 
in which we so delight. What a lesson it is that poverty 
and divinity may be full partners! What a lesson it is 
that man can reach no greatness that may equal spiritual 
greatness! Look at the splendor of our cities and our 
nation, and then remember that the merit of city and 
nation came from a homeless man, who taught in the 
streets the simple economy of a spiritual world. He had 
not even a desk or a book. He simply carried in his 
mind the wisdom of all the ages, and in his heart a celes- 
tial fire. 

Washington possessed more zeal over a few distracted 
colonies than most Americans now living possess over 
a vast nation of more than forty separate republics. He 
was more deeply moved by the little coast settlements 
than we are by the grand tramp of seventy million. 
All depends upon whether the heart permits itself to be 
filled. The thing most to be feared now is a large republic 
peopled with money-seekers. No nation or age has been 
ever able to extract immortality from riches. Riches 
can move an age, but not along the greatest paths. The 
acquisition of wealth requires, indeed, a great amount 
of thought, but it is not the best kind of thought. It is 
not poetic thought, nor patriotic thought, nor moral 
thought, nor religious, nor beautiful thought. It is well 
known that a train-dispatcher must possess an active 
mind and be always on the alert, but his mental activity 
is not of the kind that makes civilization. That man 
is quick to watch railway trains. The mental activity 
that amasses riches is not the kind that made the old 
Platos and the old Miltons. All depends upon the 
causes of the activity. Captain Kidd's pirates may have 
been hard workers, but their work was not inspirational. 
The work of value is that done in the name of man's high- 
est nature. The pursuit of riches may involve mental 
life, and yet be an industry that stops short of civilization. 
85 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

That pursuit is too narrow for the human mind. The 
soul has to be fed on poetry, romance, religion, charity, 
knowledge, usefulness, beauty, and hope. It is too 
spiritual to sit down to a diet of gold. 

Gold is not an object of value. It is a purchaser. 
To love it is to love a bookseller more than the book. 
He who has very much gold should at once purchase with 
it the world's oratory, philosophy, history, poetry, music, 
and philanthropy, because these things will make him an 
inspired soul. Money is an invitation to be great — an 
invitation too often declined. 

The west opened a great summer school for the mil- 
lions. All the world sent teachers and objects of study. 
It is not necessary for all our millions to have seen 
this great utterance and expression of the human mind. 
When our neighbors and our authors have seen the ocean, 
they have seen it for us who may never have stood upon 
its shore. We can hear of sorrows until we weep. We 
may not have been to the tropics, but we can all see palm- 
trees bend in the breeze, and can see the rich foliage of 
an eternal spring. The beauty of this one summer will 
pass from the million to the tens of millions. The beauty 
of Beatrice comes to us only in song ; the sad face of Jesus 
is seen only in history. When such moral beauty once 
gets fully into society it does not ask for our eye and our 
ear; it is pictured in the inner intellect. The mind in its 
midnight, a thousand miles from Lake Michigan, can 
see the states of our nation, and the states of the world 
assembled in the name of human progress. As we can 
tell the meaning of Shakespeare without a theater, so we 
can with the eyes closed, perceive what other eyes have 
seen. The garden of olives still weeps in our age. We 
have all seen the cross on Calvary. Oh beautiful world, 
in which beauty once seen by few is seen by all and 
forever! 

Encompassed by a most exceptional opportunity, the 
youth of the land ought to rise to the height of the hour. 
80 



GOD'S SPIRIT IN MAN 

Many of the young men are up in the heights, but a great 
multitude is down in a degradation worthy of only the 
times of Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Many of these fallen and groveling thousands possess 
education and learning enough to make them the noblest 
of citizens. The truth is, nobody knows much. The 
earth and the universe are too large to be known. If one 
steps forward in science he falls behind in history and 
language. If he runs forward in law then art and poetry 
must be slighted. If he studies to be a statesman he 
remains ignorant of the rocks and the stars. The poet 
becomes incapable of prose. Thus nobody knows much. 
The greatness of man flows out of the quality of his heart 
and not from the quantity of his learning. 

It need not be said that the studies in our schools are 
superficial, and can make only shallow men, for when 
we read the biographies of the most noble we are not con- 
fronted by great stores of learning, but rather by the 
beautiful color of the soul itself. Milton was the only 
poet that came anywhere near being learned; but there 
is no probability that he could make a survey of a field, 
or calculate an eclipse, or find the logarithm of the number 
twelve or fifteen. Dante's money gave out before he 
could finish a university course. He did not know much 
Greek; the Latin he wrote would have brought a blush 
to the cheek of Cicero or Virgil; but when we come to the 
quality of his mind and heart the scene changes, and we 
see all of the past and all his present pouring all their 
beauties into his soul. His mind selected with infinite 
taste. 

Like Isaac Newton he walked upon an infinite shore, 
picking up pebbles and shells, but each pebble was a 
diamond, and each shell contained a pearl. What educa- 
tion Dante had found at college helped him, but that 
help was small compared with the power that came from 
his survey of the human world. As he chose Beatrice 
for a decoration of his poem because of her moral and 

87 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

physical beauty, so he chose liberty for his politics, and 
Christ for his supreme hero. The march of his poem 
was amid music. It was always toward greatness. His 
friends in his journey were Virgil, Statius, and Beatrice — 
three names as snow-white as any in all biography. Vir- 
gil never wrote an immoral line, or an immoral word. 
Statius, coming a generation later, made Virgil his model. 
A wonderful pair, to be joined afterward by Beatrice and 
Dante. 

It was not Dante's learning that made him assemble 
such a group, it was simply the color of his soul. He might 
have chosen Juliet for his heroine, for it is said she was a 
beautiful girl in Verona, when Dante was there. But 
Juliet was made for a sighing Romeo, not for Dante. 
The legend of her was dreadfully coarse, compared with 
the memory of the divine beauty of Florence. Dante 
was full of an inspiration that was better to him than a 
perfect mastery of Latin. So wonderful was it that it 
made his own new language, and thus gave rise to the 
eulogy that Dante, wishing to utter music, had first to 
make his own harp. 

The plain lesson of all biography is, that a man of 
common education can become inspired. God and the 
world can breathe into him. Their own mighty spirit 
blows over him, and the heart rises to a new height. This 
is the end of indifference, for the heart loves their great 
means, and great ends; it is the end of idleness, for the 
inspired heart finds the days too short and life too small. 

When the young Ben Franklin entered Philadelphia 
he had a package of bread under his arm, but the beauty 
of the scene was that the young America was breathing 
into his heart its own great breath. He slept on a wooden 
bench in a Quaker meeting-house, but we now see that 
his soul was on a pillow of roses. We can now see that 
the little meeting-house was a royal chamber. There is 
a colossal statue of him not far from this spot. The 
lightning up to which he is looking was in his soul before 



GOD'S SPIRIT IN MAN 

he found it in the cloud. Nature had long been emptying 
her riches into that intellectual urn. Nature inspired 
the man. 

When one's heart beats low and one's spirit sinks, then 
one must open some great book, and read often some 
master intellect. When the old men now here were 
young, if the fire died out on the hearth, some one 
went to the neighbor's for a shovel of hot coals. Such a 
memory ought not to die, for it recalls that world in which, 
when the fire of the mind is out, we can run for help to 
some volume where the flame is eternal. The earth is 
dotted all over with these everlasting fires. Some, indeed, 
are in Palestine, but the land of Greece is full, the 
land of England is full, and with these altars the new 
world is blessed. The vestal virgins of literature have 
kept their sacred oaths never to let these fires go out. In 
summer and winter, and in the darkest hours one can see 
the flames fed by these immortal angels, arrayed in white. 
Our young men are without excuse, for if inspiration can- 
not spring up within, it will blow in from without. God 
did not make this world that it might raise wheat for man's 
body, but also that it might inspire his soul. The flowers 
do not blossom for man's table, but for his intellect, the 
autumn leaves do not grow red for man's dinner, but for 
his heart. The wheat-field supports the body, but it 
does this in the hope that the body will support the soul. 
The silkworm spins beautiful robes for women in the 
expectation that her spirit will be after all the richest silk. 
A spiritual God would not have made this earth for man's 
body; it is all for goodness and beauty. 

It is necessary for the young to be easily and instantly 
inspired. Let learning fill the mind with truths and 
pictures, so that one shall live not in a township or a coun- 
try, but in the whole world, and not in the present only, 
but in all times. 

Let nature inspire. Ask her for seasons to march 
before you, and they will gladly comply with your request. 
89 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

For you, Spring will dance in the meadow and make her 
birds pipe the music. She will place roses upon your 
forehead, and fling lilies at your feet. 

Let the nation inspire. It is an amazing ship built to 
carry its millions over the sea of years. Let the scene 
impress you, and pray for a peaceful sea and serene skies. 

Permit religion to lend its pure exaltation. A small 
religion made by a little deity for the use of wicked and 
mean men will not be adequate. The modern mind can be 
solemnized only by a religion made by the Infinite, for a 
great race. Select for your teacher, not some little theo- 
logian, but the great minds of all ages, and with them the 
Prince of Palestine. As if these causes were not enough 
to make the soul overflow, the Creator made the earth 
still richer and richer. There is the human home with 
its overhanging trees, and its vines on the wall. And 
then there is the fame of personal merit in work, or pro- 
fession, or art, or benevolence — in all a hundred gates 
carved and jeweled — through which the spirit of the 
Almighty sweeps like a great white angel into the souls 
of his children. 



00 



THE HUMAN MULTITUDE 

" Those strange heirs of two Worlds!" 



HUMANITY 

Humanity is the greatest theme of study, and the great- 
est object of service. God is in the midst of it. It is the 
great Westminster Abbey in which all the faithful are to 
sleep. It catches the good which all do ; it hears the wis- 
dom all speak; it reaches out its hand and takes its 'tenth' 
from each and stores it away where no death can find it and 
no time erase. Whence came Dante's fame ? His poems 
contained mankind. The ivy clings to the wall; his 
verses twined around the human heart. All eloquence, 
all poetry, have but one object — the advance of society. 
The brooks look toward the river; the eyes of the Hebrew 
maiden watched the hand of her mistress — thus all the 
great children of intellect and emotion have kept their gaze 
fixed upon the drama of the age. 

The footstep of each mortal does not keep its own time; 
it keeps step with the world's advance. 

' God bade the Sun with golden step sublime, 

Advance! 
He whispered in the listening ear of Time, 

Advance! 
He bade the guiding spirit of the Stars 
With lightning speed, in silver, shining cars, 
Along the bright floor of His azure hall, 

Advance! 
Sun, Stars, and Time obey the voice, and all 

Advance! 
Knowledge came down and waved her steady torch, 

Advance ! 
Sages proclaimed, in many a marble porch 

Advance! 
As rapid lightning leaps from peak to peak, 
The Gaul, the Goth, the Roman, and the Greek, 
The painted Briton caught the winged word 

Advance! 
And earth grew young and caroled as a bird, 

Advance! ' 

93 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

This wonderful march never began until man grew 
strong enough to distinguish between himself and his coun- 
try or his people. The moment the individual began 
to cry out, 'O my country! O my fellowman! O my 
world and my God!' then began that forward movement 
which has swept our nation onward, and which is bearing 
all things into a still greater future. The intellect and 
heart became enlarged, and the mirror, which vanity holds 
up before its own face, is cast aside that the hand may hold 
the grander mirror which contains the world. 

A classic, feeling the littleness of himself, said : 'A bird 
can fly across the whole heaven; why shall not I pass 
through a wider realm of truth?' Our age would reply: 
There is naught to hinder. Let him run everywhere, and 
see the extent of the human and divine kingdoms. No 
bird can race in the great blue sky against a noble soul. 
In a single hour our love could fall in a shower of manna 
upon the dying children in Russia. The eagle's wing is 
slow compared with the flight of love. 

'Though we climb fame's proudest height; 
Though we sit on hills afar 
Where the thrones of triumph are; 
Though all deepest mysteries be open to our sight, 

If we let no glory down 
Any darkened life to crown, 
If our grace and gladness have no ministry for pain, 
We have lived our life in vain. ' 



94 



CHRIST AND PAGANISM 

No study of Christianity would be complete which 
should omit to mark the natural or reasonable relations 
which Christ sustained toward religion. After the modern 
student has completed his inquiry as to Christ as related 
to the Mosaic age, or as related to a Trinity or the Deity, 
he must enter one more field of thought, and must contem- 
plate the Son of Man as acting in the character of a gen- 
eral advocate of the natural religion of humanity. When 
men stood around Him, with their hearts full of their own 
local faith, and full of fears for its safety, He told them 
to be perfectly calm, for He was not to be to them a de- 
stroyer, but only an advocate — a helper. He was to fill 
with truth and joy the cups that were only half full. He 
had not come to bring society a religion, but He had come 
because it already was blessed with such a possession. 

Religion was so universal and valuable that it needed 
the best wisdom that could be brought to bear upon its 
teachings and practice. Not every little idea which each 
person cherished would be nursed into life, not each jot 
and tittle held by a particular Jew or Gentile would be 
fulfilled, but no true law of religion or morality would be 
swept away. Instead of a day of destruction, there would 
come a day of profound revival and advance. The advent 
of Jesus was such a picture as was seen when eloquence 
came to man and said, I have not come to destroy your 
words, but only to teach you to speak more perfectly; 
or when music came and offered to lead the human power 
of such utterance up toward a perfect song. 

It is certain, however, that those who heard the words 
of Nazareth were far from being able to perceive the exist- 
ence of any greater ideas than their own, and for them to 
lose a jot or a tittle was for all piety to fail. The teacher 

95 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

was soon put to death, the populace being unable to be- 
lieve that their daily religion was capable of being fulfilled 
any more perfectly than it had been fulfilled by their 
fathers and high priests. It was as though Mozart had 
volunteered to teach the American Indians music and they 
had slain him for attempting to teach so many as eight 
notes. Away with him! our tribes have used but three 
notes, lo! these many generations. It would not be 
safe to assume that all Christians who are now living are 
fully aware that humanity has always possessed a deep 
and rich religion, and has needed from the sky, not a new 
creation in the realm of piety, but only a helping hand. 
Very many persons have been so imprisoned within the 
walls of a special church that they have never seen the 
broad and fair landscape of that natural religion which 
has sounded like a great ocean rolling around the Christian 
church, and which was reason-of-being to the Jesus of 
Nazareth. He came because religion was already here. 

On the Irish coast there is a great stone temple, which, 
when built, centuries ago, was almost a league from the 
sea, but which now catches the spray from the waves. 
The music of its organ is often assisted by the deep roar of 
many waters. The ocean helps the worshipers to chant 
their psalm. That sanctuary stands as an emblem of the 
higher Christianity of our age, for the tide of natural 
religion has slowly crept up nearer to its altar, and the 
hymn sung inside the structure reared by man is taken 
up by the great outstanding race. The church and man- 
kind join in the melody. 

It will soon be a confessed charm of the Christian re- 
ligion that it brings to man that which is his own. The 
devout heart will soon say: It brings me back my own. 
It has traversed the lonely mountains, and has found and 
has brought back my lost one. It has not made the 
heavens or the earth, but it has redoubled the pageantry 
of the seas and has increased the splendor of the stars. 
It has elevated man until he has grown more nearly equal 



CHRIST AND PAGANISM 

to his vast surroundings. It has led him up to what was 
always his own rich estate. 

There were revivals and conversions before those under 
Savonarola and Whitefield, and there is still a saving 
faith nourishing in India. What an impressive picture 
it would be could we see the time and place at which 
Epictetus met with a change of heart! What a scene, 
could we note the joy upon his face when to him, a slave, 
there came the peace which passeth all understanding! 
The scene was long ago, in pagan Rome, but the conver- 
sion was none the less complete. A great faith flamed 
out. The slave died unto sin, but lived unto righteous- 
ness. The catechism asks, 'What is sanctification ?' The 
reply is in these words : 'Sanctification is the work of God's 
free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man 
after the image of God, and are enabled more and more 
to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.' 

Epictetus lived before the name of Jesus had become 
known in the Roman empire, but not previous to the 
existence of God's grace, nor before that grace had be- 
come free. He and his God seemed inseparable. He 
was renewed in the whole man after the image of the 
Creator. His conduct and his pious words were in com- 
plete harmony. When speaking of the end of life, he 
confessed he should love, in dying, to have time to utter 
these thoughts: 'Have I, oh God, in any respect trans- 
gressed Thy commands ? Have I not used properly the 
powers Thou gavest me? Have I ever blamed Thee? 
Have I ever found fault with Thy providence ? At Thy 
command I have been poor, but I was content. It was 
Thy pleasure I should reach no high office, and I had been 
contented. Have I not ever come to Thee with a cheerful 
countenance, ready to obey Thy commands ? It is now 
Thy will that I depart from the ranks of men ! I depart. 
I give Thee thanks that Thou has permitted me to live 
in the world, and see all Thy works, and to comprehend 
Thy kingdom. Take back again all, for it has all come 
97 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

from Thee.' Thus the facts of conversion and regener- 
ation long ago lay in the pagan world, and where sin 
abounded God's grace did much more abound. Adop- 
tion is seen taking the Greek slave by the hand and lead- 
ing him into the home of the Infinite One, an exact por- 
trait of the loving, trusting, and advancing Epictetus. 
The catechism was like its Master, only fulfilling the natu- 
ral law of the pious heart. It was not destroying, it was 
painting to the life. 

Max Muller, in a recent essay, draws a picture more 
beautiful than even this image of Epictetus. It is of a 
pagan girl, who was born in India only thirty years ago. 
When only nine she was given in marriage to a youth of 
eleven. While moving along hand in hand like a new 
Paul and Virginia, these two 'natural minds' came upon 
not only the flowers of the field and the quiet haunts 
sacred to a holy friendship, but also upon the footprints 
of God. Little by little the clouds of idolatry rolled away, 
one by one their idols fell, and their whole sky became full 
of that inexpressible splendor which awes man into silence, 
except in so far as he whispers the simple word — God. 
These two climbed up to this rich thought that, God alone 
existed in the beginning; He created all things; He is intel- 
ligent, infinite, benevolent, omnipotent, the refuge of all, 
immutable, self-existent, and beyond all comparison; that 
by worshiping Him man can attain the highest good in 
this life and the next, and that this worship consists in loving 
Him and doing His works. 

To live in the name of such truth, and in the liberty of 
such a faith and life, these two hearts surrendered their 
ties of relationship, and all the property which was fol- 
lowing along from parent to child. The new truth seemed 
of more value than much gold. They would prefer to see 
the earth empty of all else rather than to see it empty of 
a deep and true religion. Cut off from their friends, cut 
off from society, from art, from the pleasures fabricated 
by man, they went daily to the great temple of nature, and 



CHRIST AND PAGANISM 

mingled their prayers with its sunbeams and moonbeams. 
Twice a day they held an hour of prayer — a service not 
full of formality, but full of bliss. When recently this 
young woman died, she died saying, 'Oh, Thou All-Mer- 
ciful!' 

While passing in thought and study through the pagan 
world, the mind comes upon such faces as these seen in 
old or new paganism, it can not but feel that man's reli- 
gion is like his music, his art, or his intellect — one and the 
same always. In some lands or islands the natives use 
only three or four notes, but all who hear the two or three 
strings touched by a negro in Africa feel that those strains 
are full sisters of those touched elsewhere by Beethoven 
and Mozart. Germany did not come to destroy the sounds 
heard along the Congo or the Amazon, but to fulfill the 
great destiny of each tone. Very wide, indeed, is the 
empire of pleasant sound! Cowper was in it when he 
heard the bells of the village church: 

' How soft the music of those village bells, 
Falling at intervals upon the ear 
In cadence sweet.' 

That poet was in this empire who said, 'There is always 
a song somewhere'; that of the robin in the tree, or the 
cricket on the hearth, or the sea on its shore, or of man in 
his heart; here, too, was the Wagner when he wrote; here, 
too, that one who died amid the sweetness of his own 
requiem. As this realm of sound is one and the same 
in all its gradations of sweetness or sublimity, so religion 
has but one domain, and the noblest Christianity is only 
the old pagan heart restrung and tuned for a grander 
symphony. 

As Christianity has been taught for centuries, Christ 
has been retarded by it rather than hurried forward. 
Very rarely has such blessed peace in God sprung up in 
the church as is seen in either Epictetus or in the Hindoo 
girl. Worship has been hindered by intellectual inquiry. 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

As merchandizing, trades, commerce, machines and in- 
ventions injure poetry, because they give the mind so 
many new tasks that it cannot but admit the pursuit of 
that old form of beauty, so the hundreds of ideas, debates 
and definitions cannot but lessen the play in the heart of 
that certain divine poetry which turns life into a commu- 
nion with God and death into an indescribable triumph. 

Nearly all persons who read the story of Soudamini, 
as told by Max Miiller, will confess that they know of no 
American Christian of late years who has reached any 
such spiritual excellence as that reached by the pagan 
girl. The reason of such western inferiority cannot be 
blamed upon any defect in the gospel of Christ, for Christ 
Himself fulfilled all the ideals and hopes of Greek and 
Hindoo. Epictetus would have been a St. John for Jesus 
and Soudamini would have added another Mary to the 
early group. The inferiority of American and English 
saints must be charged upon the fact that they do not 
possess a religion of living and dying — a religion all bril- 
liant with the colors of time and immortality — but instead 
of such a treasure they possess a wild entanglement of 
teachings which teach from the manuscript of Genesis to 
the manuscript of the Apocalypse, to keep which books 
in harmony and to defend each word from some enemy 
is the work of a lifetime. The churches have been like 
those ancient nations which exhausted all their men and 
wealth in defending their borders from their foes. The 
standing army drew all the nourishment away from the 
home and the field. Christianity has suffered greatly 
from the length of the border it has had to defend. It 
has known few hours when it could sit down in the world 
of perfect peace and enjoy the riches it had defended. 

It has been generally forgotten that the Christian 
religion is of Oriental character, and was better fitted 
for inspiring worshipers than for endowing theologians 
with exact doctrines. All that European theology which 
was deduced from Palestine was the result of a kind of 

100 



CHRIST AND PAGANISM 

violence done by a cold north to the glowing south. We 
ought to have loved most the fervor of early worship and 
to have caught that spirit of the south which cares little 
for logical systems, but cares much for persons and things, 
much for God, friends, home, and heaven. Christ ought 
to be carried along in some of His own warm utterances, 
such as ' Come unto Me ' and ' Believe and be saved, ' 
' God our Father in heaven, ' ' God surpasses the earthly 
parents in kindness,' 'In heaven there are many man- 
sions,' 'All men are brothers,' 'All worshipers are one,' 
' God's love includes the sparrow and the lily and cannot 
exclude man. ' Thus the religion of Jesus once glowed 
like the tropics. When the early Christians met they did 
not meet to formulate a philosophy; only to sing and 
rejoice and to see from a vale of tears the waving banners 
of a better land. After all credit has been given to the 
snow and austerity of winter, it is summer that makes our 
world. Winter can be endured, but it cannot make an 
impressive planet. Out of the burning days come the 
harvest fields and the marvelous procession of life. In 
this glow of nature all things live and move and have 
their being. 

Not all the southern religions have been true and good, 
but they have all been very full of sentiment. They have 
all been as fragrant as the spices and the flowers which 
they have grown under the sun. Christ came bringing 
at once truth and emotion. He uttered the greatest 
truths ever contained in any language, but He also painted 
like an artist and seized humanity ardently by the hand. 
He said to the Deity with Epictetus, 'Have I not done 
Thy will ? Have I complained over that poverty which 
was my inheritance ? Have I not met Thee with a smile ? 
And if Thou asked Me to die even upon the cross, will I 
not go ? Yes, I will go thanking Thee for the years I 
have had in this life. ' Having cried out thus in harmony 
with the Greek moralist, He also spoke the final words 
of Soudamini : ' Oh, Thou All-Merciful. ' Thus pagan- 

101 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

ism and Christianity standing wholly apart for these 
eighteen hundred years, decretly meet tens of thousands 
of times in the heart of man, and go to different sanctu- 
aries with one and the same infinite peace. In the life 
of Jesus Christ are these many lives fulfilled. He cer- 
tainly came not to destroy such kneeling forms, but rather 
He came to draw such worshipers nearer the God whom 
they love. It is easier to lead to heaven souls which are 
almost there. 

In estimating paganism it must be observed that their 
religion is no more beclouded than their acts, industry, 
and social life. Each branch of that life lies in a deep 
shadow. Not only will we carry to them our Testament, 
but they will come toward it, because it contains the 
simplest religion known to our race — the religion of Jesus 
when estimated by Himself alone. Christianity and nat- 
ural religion are one, as the minds and the hearts which 
thought and loved in the far past are one with those which 
think and love to-day. The single thought that Christ 
came not to harm any religious feelings, but to lead each 
pious heart forward, gives to religion a height and breadth 
which help it to seem true and compel it to be sublime. 



102 



WHOM SHALL WE FOLLOW? 

Intelligent persons should be as proud of their religion 
as they are of their fondness for nature or art. No one 
can become happy in the presence of an evening sky or 
beneath overhanging trees without being glad that his 
heart contains the power to catch and feel these forms of 
beauty. This faculty brings one into near relationship 
with a greater empire than self and thus pours a deeper 
meaning into life. 

As the common school-girl runs home saying, 'I have 
seen the queen ! ' ' I have seen the king ! ' lifted out of her 
common feelings by the vision of some person infinitely 
above herself, so all minds move more exultantly when 
they are looking upon or have just seen some spectacle of 
great charm or great power. 

It is desirable, therefore, that persons of thought should 
possess a religion of which they can easily be proud; not 
a religion of which a fanatic might boast, but one which 
the highest intelligence could always contemplate with 
delight. Paul seems to have revealed this pride when 
he wrote that he was not ashamed, for he knew well the 
one whom he was following and trusting. The common 
multitude, which lives and dies far away from any inflic- 
tion, had made great sport of the man who had espoused 
the cause of Nazareth. 

In its effort to satisfy itself our age is meeting with 
great difficulty. It is anxious to know in whom it should 
believe and to find a repetition of the Pauline pride and 
repose, but each new effort arouses the stormy passions 
of those who steadily refuse to look toward the divinest 
ideal. If art finds many of its highest principles in all of 
the most enlightened nations, it would seem vain to make 
a study of the taste and practices of the South Sea islands. 
103 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

Thus in Christianity, if Christ possesses a certain pre- 
eminence as the founder of a current religion, the modern 
Christian mind should turn toward Him and say with the 
calm apostle, ' I know him in whom I have believed, and 
I must push aside all objects which obscure the form of 
the great leader.' 

If it ardently desires to know in what or in whom it 
shall believe, it will be compelled to part company with, 
not only Hegel, but with all those who have composed 
complex and obscure systems. It must travel toward 
those principles in which all times and all Christian 
churches agree, because only in those is there an end of 
obscurity. 

Puritanism may have been a bold, hard politics and re- 
ligion, but it never was Christianity. If Christ knew what 
Christianity was it follows of necessity that the Puritans 
did not. It was permitted the negro school-teacher in 
Virginia to teach the two theories of the sun, that it stands 
still, also that it goes around the earth daily. Between 
these two theories he kindly permitted his pupils to take 
a choice or to embrace both; but the modern churchman 
cannot so easily hold Puritanism and Christianity in 
the same heart. The Puritans were Christians indeed, 
but Puritanism was not Christianity. It was a political 
storm raised for the purpose of overthrowing a form of 
political despotism; it was not the perpetual sweet breeze 
of religion, but only a cyclone capable of leveling the lofty 
heads of things. It was a cyclone also so directed as to 
leave unharmed the homes of the Puritans, but to sweep 
away the property of Quaker or heathen, or Catholic. 
That age was Mosaic rather than Christian; for Christ 
having, with a great industry, toiled to displace the crim- 
inal code of Leviticus, the Bradfords and Pyms as in- 
dustriously up-placed it and went forward cutting down 
unfriendly sects and establishing a company of ' the elect, ' 
just as Joshua had done in the old epoch of darkness 
and cruelty. If the ethics of Jesus was true the ethics of 

104 



WHOM SHALL WE FOLLOW? 

the Puritans was false, unless the church of to-day has 
found some method of making identical gross injustice 
and the most beautiful equity. 

The justice of the Puritans was only a tribal honesty, 
not a Nazarene righteousness for the human race. When 
our New England was under this 'ideal faith' a good 
orthodox did not feel compelled to pay debts to them that 
were ' without. ' A story was told that the regular saints 
bought much goods of a Mr. Faireclothe, but when they 
afterwards found that their creditor was not a Calvinist, 
but an Episcopalian, they refused to pay their debts, and 
told the man that money would only separate him the 
more fully from God and salvation; that persons outside 
the true church ought to be free from money and busi- 
ness, that they might possess more time for repentance 
and prayer. So instead of paying the man his due, the 
creditors simply cut off his ears, and whipped him, in the 
fashion of the period. As this story was written about 
1640, it must be confessed a fair picture of a day when 
the welfare of 'the elect' made ridiculous the welfare of 
all mankind. A universal right and kindness were never 
a theme of thought or dream. 

It is set down to the credit of the Puritans that they were 
true to God's word. Such credit comes from a modern, 
unbridled admiration rather than from reflection, for in 
order to be true to the Bible, one must first know what the 
Bible means. Governor Endicott was so fond of the 
Bible that he said that rather than have a heretic in his 
district he would personally hang every one of them, 
while Thomas Hooker urged as an argument for the ex- 
termination of the Indians, the promise of God that he 
would curse those who should curse his chosen people. 
These men all loved the Bible, indeed, but they ruined this 
love by not knowing the meaning of their book. The 
Mosaic law had been repealed, but the Puritans were 
not aware of the fact. 

In 1815 the British and American troops met in awful 
105 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

battle near New Orleans. Each army dearly loved its 
own country, and on the exercise of that love and its zeal 
the soldiers marched into the full storm of fire. Soon 
two thousand brave men lay dead upon the field. Alas 
for their patriotism! Peace had been made in England 
long before that fatal morning had dawned, but in that day 
of slow ships the news of peace had not reached the gen- 
erals' camps. Thus Puritanism loved the word of God, 
but it fought on in zealous savagery, not knowing that 
their King in Bethlehem had signed long before a treaty 
of universal peace. Their master had come for the ex- 
press purpose of destroying the Mosaic age, and so de- 
lighted were the Puritans with their Divine Master that 
they embraced Him and the Mosaic age both at once. 

So wedded was this Puritanism to the belief in the 
welfare of a class and in the well-merited misery of the 
multitude, that the first protest against slave-ships and 
slavery had to come from the Quakers; and heresy had 
to win a great victory before New England could reach 
common justice or possess a literature, or a high civiliza- 
tion. New England founded by Pilgrims and the Puri- 
tans was carried forward and civilized by unbelief. 

But this 'unbelief had for its object not the world's 
great friend — the Son of Man — but rather those tenets 
which distinguished Puritanism from other phases of 
opinion. The mind-reaching work of power and reflec- 
tion preferred the simple teachings of Nazareth to all the 
volumes of Augustines and Tertullians. Even John 
Milton himself died a rationalist rather than the orthodox 
Christian of that day. He was a free-thinker of the 
Emersonian type. Great must have been the power of 
Puritanism that it made a great man of the Milton who 
was an Arminian and Unitarian! 

The Puritan principles distinctly did not give those 
men what religious success they may have reached. 
Fully as great success attended the. religion of John Wes- 
ley, and yet he omitted many of the doctrines which had 
106 



WHOM SHALL WE FOLLOW? 

been so significant in the former upheaval. We are, 
indeed, bound by such phenomena to look back of both 
centuries and see in the teachings of Jesus alone the only 
potency there was in both the Puritan and Wesleyan 
movements ; and, therefore, the question ' Whom follow ? ' 
must receive the reply that we must follow only that One 
who has inspired at once each person and sect of the long 
Christian path. We can easily secure a copy of the New 
Testament — a little volume which contains all the good 
which has ever entered into any one of the Christian 
brotherhoods. 

The character and whole history of Jesus Christ has 
been so complete in their power to transform and inspire, 
that they have equipped for usefulness a hundred denom- 
inations and possess still enough spiritual energy to endow 
with strength a hundred more sects, whenever it may 
please the fertile human intellect to invent them. The 
Palestine philosophy has been so true, so welcome, so 
immense, that instead of being created by the sects, any 
one or all, it has simply been too great to be destroyed by 
these successive forms of opinion. 

Study Puritanism in order to realize how much Chris- 
tianity could endure without dying; to realize how difficult 
it was, and will be, to ruin those doctrines of duty and 
hope which were taught by the lips which spake as never 
man spake. Instead of taking the past time as a guide — 
whether those times were Roman or Protestants — it will 
be better to read along over all those historic pages, in 
order to note where heaven has been with its forgiveness. 
If the little child appears on the page its treatment asks 
for forgiveness; if the poor man is studied the heart soon 
comes to a place, where the age needed forgiveness; if 
woman is made an object of contemplation, again the sky 
is seen looking down with pity upon even the sanctuary 
in which she bowed as a slave. 

In these current years the question ' Whom follow ? ' 
possesses a new significance, because it may find an answer 

107 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

which past times did not dare to give. Each foot finds 
or makes its own path. Hearts free but empty! With 
what shall they be filled ? No modern need be empty, 
for our age has made more conspicuous and impressive 
a few doctrines of true piety. It is wonderful how few 
are the cardinal ideas of religion. Sublime things are 
never numerous. One great truth will, however, fill the 
heart. Why carry an empty spirit when one truth will 
fill it ? 

The Christian has all things when he carries his Master, 
the Deist has all things when he carries with him the 
supreme God. These hearts may, if they choose, carry 
also in friendship a few other objects, a Job, a Moses, a 
Homer, or a Milton, a creed, or a church, but the soul is 
not filled with these. The classic ships wore a wreath 
on the bow, but this wreath was not the valuable cargo, nor 
the ship's load of valuable life. Thus the modern child 
of mortality may if he choose bear along with him some 
trifle of worth or beauty, some thought from some school 
or genius, but his soul need not be full of anything but 
his Nazarene Master or his God. The heroic General 
Gordon relied upon one book alone — the Imitation of 
Christ. It suited all the hours that could come. He 
knew very exactly in whom he believed, and he was will- 
ing to send away all Puritans, all Arminians, all pagans, 
that he might in India or Africa be with One alone. It 
often happens in our world that the more idols the heart 
loves the poorer is its worship at any one altar. In reli- 
gion it is not desirable to carry much in the spirit except 
the being of God. He becomes more infinite and more 
blessed when all smaller objects are left behind. In the 
realm of faith the heart needs little else when it holds its 
Savior or its Deity. 

In the Christian religion Christ leads to the Father. 
Beyond doubt many reach the Father without being 
Christ-led. To believe in God and be in Him and with 
Him, should be the aspiration of all living in this age. 

108 



WHOM SHALL WE FOLLOW? 

The Christians now living need look only beyond the 
discordant centuries and say to the form in Bethlehem, 
' I have Thee, Thou leadest me to the Father. ' It is 
enough, and more than enough, for the study of God can 
never be exhausted nor can the worship of woman and 
gratitude ever be completed in this life. 



109 



FEED MY LAMBS 

With many millions the Sunday and the hour at church 
are the largest items of the whole week. If the service 
should not teach any new fact it often awakens the 
mind and sends it off in a chase after religious ideas and 
emotions of which the pulpit little dreamed. Often the 
hymn is more powerful than the sermon. Often the sunny 
day and some bright faces met at church surpass in effect 
both sermon and hymn, and the heart goes home touched 
with the beauty of the human race and with the wisdom 
and goodness of God. 

Men and women who now boast that for twenty, 
thirty, or forty years they have not been present at a service 
in any church, boast that they can find nothing of value 
in the pulpit or pew, would better ask their hearts whether 
they are thinking of the essential quality of the Christian- 
ity of to-day or are still lamenting over the corruptions of 
Rome before Luther, or over the sad fates of Galiles and 
Servetus ? 

Some of these anti-church minds are indeed full of 
these old facts to the exclusion of the better present, but 
the explanation which meets most of these instances is 
found in the fact these cold persons possess no taste for 
anything apart from their special trade or pursuits. The 
soul can be taught to shrink down to the size of any call- 
ing, however small it may be. The soul is not only elastic 
to expand, but it is elastic to shrink. Many a gambler 
lives and dies with the beautiful world of literature, nature, 
and art all excluded, his soul having shrunk so as to fit 
only his art. Some of these men have lost their love of 
hills, fields, sea, and land. 

Before parting with religion let us boldly ask our hearts, 
what it is that is coming between us and the study or wor- 
110 



FEED MY LAMBS 



ship of God ? Is it only religion we dislike ? Do we 
visit the poor, the sick, the prisons, while others less 
thoughtful and less kind are attending some church ? 
Have we flung aside piety because we have found benevo- 
lence? If we have not been at church for forty years, 
have we found some practice more valuable to society 
and our own heart? Have we found something more 
beautiful than the altar? It is not necessarily in our 
favor that we have flung the church away. We may have 
been too narrow to measure it or too cold to love it. The 
great question is, What have we found in its stead? A 
pirate may fling away church, state, and home. Man 
must estimate himself by only what he adds to his soul. 
A dumb brute can fling away beauty — it is manhood and 
womanhood to find it. 

With ideas filling the Christian church, why should 
any modern mind boast of any absence and isolation from 
the house of God ? Are not the ideas of religion great 
enough ? Are they not sufficiently beautiful ? Foolish 
men, foolish women, to fling aside the modern altars of 
worship! They seem like the ancient tribe which did 
not know the value or beauty of gold, and made their 
rings and necklaces out of iron. 

Let us not fall below a far-off pagan and expect any 
of the higher sentiments to grow upon a diet of endless 
labor and money and wheels. Sunday ought to bring us 
all two rich blessings — rest and certain exalted feelings. 

One of the mottoes of political leaders is ' organize. ' 
Many generations ago religion and Christianity organ- 
ized, and each little church in the country and each great 
church in the city is a member of an organization noble 
and vast. 

The highest mental progress was always found where 
there is most of intellectual liberty. The English church 
in London has been an organism almost as compact as 
that of Rome, but along came the free churches of all 
forms and grades, and in fifty years they have caught up 

111 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

with their great competitor. Military form and precision 
may be valuable in an army, but they are poor things in 
the great realm of learning and thought. We do not 
want to be told to read Virgil or Homer, or die. You can 
omit the anathema. All we want is that you shall teach 
us the contents of these books. It is not necessary to say 
to us, Listen to this music. It is enough if the music be 
played for us. The main thing is to get truth before the 
intellect of the world; to place it in beauty and clearness 
before the whole people. There is demand for great 
activity, and great love, but the facts seem to show that 
the propagandism need not be narrow and intense, but it 
may be much like the widespread industry which scatters 
music from home to home, or which makes literature 
travel far and gladly. Nobody compels us to love nature. 
All speak of it; all write of it; all read of it; all come in 
from the country carrying a few blossoms — and at last 
before this propaganda all hearts bow. We need only 
blossoms. 

It is a significant fact that under all the laxness of 
Protestantism religion and civilization have under it gone 
steadily forward. The military rule of the church in 
Spain has not made that land as happy as our New Eng- 
land, where Christianity has equaled the chameleon in 
the ability to change color. Once on that eastern shore 
the religion of Jonathan Edwards triumphed. It espoused 
the policy of non-intercourse, so dear to the Romans. It 
had no patience with Quakers, and was hot in its pursuit 
of persons not of its own name. But New England's 
mind could not grow in such a jail. For more than a 
hundred years there have been in those states as many 
kinds of sects as there are kinds of trees in the forest, and 
yet onward has gone a true Christianity. What society 
depends upon is activity of thought and deed within the 
channel of a divine goodness. No matter how often the 
chameleon shall change its color if it shall always be 
beautiful. Sects may involve a loss of money and love, 
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but there must be great industry in religion and great 
liberty. Out of such relations wonderful good ought to 
come. These pulpits are some of the school-masters of 
the century. It is a great question, What shall they 
teach ? 

The scene between Christ and one of His first mission- 
aries ought to throw some light upon this inquiry. He 
said to this missionary, ' Feed my lambs. ' Lest the 
agent might not grasp the order of his Chief, the order 
was repeated three times to the ardent Peter. Peter 
himself may have obeyed the Master, but the successors 
of the saint soon forgot two parts of the order — the fact 
of food and the fact of lambs. The lamb needs gentle 
treatment, and it needs the right kind of food. Christ 
gave his agent the proper estimate of the human lamb, 
and some example of the kind of food the creature should 
be permitted to enjoy. Man was to be the recipient of a 
daily compassion. When a little child he was taken up 
in Christ's arms; when he was thirty some friend was to 
give him a cup of water; when he was guilty of some hasty 
word or deed he was to be forgiven; when he was hungry 
and far from home he was to have bread made for him in 
the wilderness; if he wished you to go with him a mile 
you would better go two miles than not to reveal some 
kindness; he was to be sought for and urged to come to 
a feast; if, like the prodigal son, he had wandered far away 
he would find his father's house open, should he repent 
and wish to return home. When his Savior was dying 
He flung His forgiveness around among His enemies, as 
though their act lay wholly in their ignorance, and that 
but for this infirmity all humanity would be friends. 

In the estimate which Jesus made of our race man was 
a lamb — the object not of cruelty, but of tender care. 
The relations of Christianity to mankind are therefore 
purely benevolent, and the forty denominations which in 
this land stand related to many millions of persons are 
only so many kind shepherds watching over vast roaming 

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flocks. A Latin writer said : ' Man is often a wolf to man. 
He often forgets his part as a shepherd and plays perfectly 
the part of a wolf.' An ancient writer says: 'What a 
guardian of sheep a wolf would be!' When the great 
Shepherd had been gone a few generations, the sub-shep- 
herds were not slow into turning into wolves, and then 
did the lambs have a time of it for a long row of cen- 
turies. 

John Milton was one of the first great men to look upon 
Christianity as a free offering to society, as an offering un- 
tended by any form of force; but even John Milton was 
not broad enough, for he wanted the Catholics to be ex- 
cepted from this grand freedom of thought. Milton was 
like the early colonists, who believed in the liberty of all 
men except the negroes. Roger Williams was almost the 
first modern to believe that religion was to be wholly out- 
side the pale of all law and all force. The Turk, the 
Papist, and the Protestant were to have one right and one 
peace. With such eloquence did Roger Williams advo- 
cate this view that he was soon ordered out of the New 
England camp, and after finding shelter for four winter 
months among the Indians, he created the little colony of 
Rhode Island and again turned men into lambs, and the 
clergyman into a kind shepherd. He it was who said 
that Christianity was wholly incapable of using violence 
to effect changes in human belief. One wolf may perse- 
cute a hundred lambs, but the hundred lambs could not 
persecute one wolf. He inferred that religion contains 
no wolf. Its only emblems are a shepherd and his flock. 
Our country adopted this idea, and with the downfall of 
fanaticism the little New England began to expand into a 
great nation. 

Having seen that humanity sustains only gentle and 
tender relations to religion, that the church must feed the 
large flock, what kind of food must be offered to these 
free and roving minds ? The food fed ought not to be the 
abstractions the schoolmen flung down before it. We 

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are all aware that many millions have been murdered by 
the church, but for just what crime we do not know. It 
is probable the shepherds gave the lambs wormwood 
leaves to eat, and then killed them for not thinking the 
stuff to be sweet hay. Distance dims the landscape. All 
we know is this : we should dislike to go back to the fifteenth 
century and recite over its pulpit this verse: 

' And then when gray hairs shall their temples adorn, 
Like lambs they shall still in my bosom be borne. ' 

The flames scorched the silver locks of so many martyrs, 
the tortures twisted the arms of so many noble men and 
little children, that those words would stand as a falsehood 
too great to be overlooked by even infinite mercy. 'Feed 
my lambs,' said Jesus. Let the pages of history tell how 
man can be a wolf to man. Homo homini lupus. 

The whole sky has changed. The blackness of the 
past has rolled away. The forty denominations are be- 
ginning to feed their flocks. Religion has been detached 
from endless abstractions, and is becoming allied to litera- 
ture and all high education and morals. But its new 
affiliations are not yet complete. Christianity must be- 
come the full and open champion of public prudence and 
public morals. What are called the doctrines of salva- 
tion are not numerous enough to claim from the pulpit 
all the Sundays of the year. And furthermore, the 'car- 
dinal doctrines' become wearisome when they are repeated 
each day for a long series of years. The human heart 
always sinks under monotony. Man loves the four seasons 
more than he loves a never-changing summer. Thus the 
churches, to feed the modern world, must speak to it in 
a new breath. They should confess the many-sidedness 
of man, the breadth and depth of life, the volume of his 
philosophy, and the need there is of having in tune all the 
strings of his harp. 

It is essential for the pulpit to preach on the economics 
of human life, for if religion sweetens life, so life must 
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TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

sweeten religion. The pulpit is deeply interested in the 
common welfare of man, because the common welfare 
makes faith in God and man more possible; it must spend 
one-half its time in teaching religion and the other half in 
teaching the rules of life. Christ did not say, Feed my 
lambs in the morning, and let the wolf take care of them 
after twelve o'clock. The order was to take care of a 
human life in all its hours and years. If we shall look at 
some of the oldest nations, we shall see what ruin comes 
from a religion which writes the songs of heaven and per- 
mits the devil to write the songs of this world. 

At least one-half of the time of the pulpit and one-half 
the thought of the church must go, not toward religion, 
but toward the man who must believe it and love it. In 
our age it is not only the poor child and the ignorant per- 
son that must be spoken to and spoken of. There is a 
higher and educated class that has been led away from all 
spirituality. A large number of youth have put their 
hearts into the physical world until they have no soul and 
no God. They have quit the sanctuary because they have 
found out the great cheat about a divine creation. The 
worlds and all their contents were made by cellular aggre- 
gations. These young people can tell us how humanity 
came, and into what a dust heap it is going. Thought is 
almost an action of fluids. You touch a sensitive plant, 
it will wither. After awhile some plants will have the 
sense of hearing as well as the sense of touch. The time 
will come when the roses will not only smell sweetly, but 
they will sing. The apples will see, and the oak trees will 
think. Man is simply in advance of the sensitive plant. 
A touch affects that plant, a word will send the blood to 
or from man's cheek. He is an advanced plant, but he 
cannot avoid his destiny of dust. Such is the material- 
ism that is emptying many a soul of all spirituality and of 
nearly all beauty. 

The youth who can thus make the universe, and who 
have cut loose from all power of the Creator, may not yet 

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be a vast army, but they are a host too large and too valu- 
able to be lost. They possess, perhaps, a college educa- 
tion. Their number, not immense, may be rapidly in- 
creasing. Their studies have for years been almost 
wholly physical. In the face of all which facts the pulpit 
must become the active and enthusiastic champion of 
man as a divine and exceptional being. 

In all these young hearts there is a slumbering soul, 
half divine, but deadened by years of boasting science 
and of a dogmatic and enfeebled sanctuary. Science has 
been more eloquent than religion. The pulpit has, in- 
deed, made great advance, but the scholarship and breadth 
has not been great enough to make the spiritual world rise 
up before us as an enchanted land. 

Each age demands its own kind of food. What our 
land needs is a new exaltation of man as the child of a 
God, a creature of infinite outlook and thrilling mystery. 
All that pertains to man — his reason, his sentiments, his 
moral feelings, his taste, his genius, his friendship, his 
religion — must all be reaffirmed in language that will once 
more thrill and inspire. The pulpit cannot, indeed, dem- 
onstrate any of its spiritual propositions, but it can build 
up a feeling and a hope which can make materialism 
doubt its tenets and hush its boastings. All the beauty and 
impulse are on the side of a spiritual kingdom. Men 
would love it could they only hear of it the more and the 
more richly. There is nothing in materialism to be ad- 
mired or loved. The mind must sink to reach it; the 
heart, to espouse it, must first empty itself of all noble 
affection. It must call the air and water its sisters, and 
must call the dust its destiny. A heart does not love to 
do this. A material age must act a long time upon hu- 
manity before it can separate the soul from its poetry and 
its heaven. There is something in man that compels him 
to look up and to long for a greater world and a greater 
life. It will take materialization a hundred years to break 
the human heart. 

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TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

The church, having taught economy and temperance 
and industry, and having fought also for man as a divine 
and spiritual being, must load him with pleasures, but it 
must spiritualize these until they shall become worthy of 
a human race. When we think of the bull-fight, and the 
man-fight, the horse-race, the gambler's den, and the 
saloon, we must conclude with Emerson that life would be 
endurable were it not for its pleasures. It can stand its 
labors well enough, and its taxes and its poverty, but under 
its pleasures it dies. The church must battle for amuse- 
ments all laughter and joy, but these must be in harmony 
with the high and great life. It must pluck sackcloth and 
ashes from the temples, but not to make the forehead 
brazen; the sackcloth must be withdrawn that roses 
may find room. He who painted the wings of the hum- 
blest insect will not sprinkle ashes upon the soul. 

Especially should the pulpit and the church scatter 
flowers on the graves of the Union dead, for those awful 
battles and the awful carnage were planned by the blind- 
ness and weakness of religion. Christians in England 
opened a traffic in human bodies and souls. The pulpit 
was too weak or too ignorant to oppose slavery in its be- 
ginning. This false lead of England and Europe and 
church followed, and gave us the spectacle of a great 
crime reposing upon the form of Christ — wonderful pic- 
ture painted by the church — Christ as a slave-driver! 
But such was the picture, and the church sat down and 
admired it until our nation saw fourteen states deeply 
injured by slavery, and the whole republic dishonored. 

The church should bless the soldiers for having by 
their blood atoned for the cowardice of the sanctuary. 
The pulpit should adorn the battle-fields that brought to 
them the unsullied Christ of Nazareth and Calvary. The 
church should march as a penitent full of regrets that, 
wearing the name of Jesus, it made such a poor estimate 
of the rights of man. Had the church done its moral 
duty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the nine- 
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teenth would have escaped the awful war of brother 
against brother, south against north. When a religion 
espouses a great wrong, then the sword and the battle- 
field must come. Violence must come when love has 
failed. 

The term church once implied a society as definite and 
as secret as the early associations of nations, but at last 
it comes to mean a group of persons who meet anywhere 
for the worship of the Infinite Father. Should pious 
souls meet under the trees in summer, or take the commu- 
nion out in a solitude of prairie flowers, they would place 
into the word church a divine import. The more great 
terms are spiritualized the more truthful they become. 
They are like the early and successive portraits of the 
human face, each having some resemblance to a higher 
humanity, but no one being an adequate image. The 
Egyptians failed most completely to catch the image of 
both soul and body. The Greeks reached a more truthful 
art, but it is confessed not full justice was done the human 
forehead. The era of Raphael marked a great advance, 
but his times could paint a face better than they could 
express the soul. Thus the human face and soul pass on, 
eluding all the long lines of artists. Such words as 'faith' 
and 'church' and 'salvation' are waiting for each age to 
paint more truthfully their whole beauty and their inmost 
spirit; each century must sit down by a new canvas and 
ask for a new sitting of all those objects whose beauties 
the whole past has touched only to mar. 

It has become known that once in thirty years our 
planet earth moves into some zone which abounds in 
meteoric balls, and flashes and trails of dazzling light. 
No one knows what are or whence come these lamps in 
the limitless midnight. They are beautiful and impressive. 
Not otherwise the church, in regular periods, sweeps along 
into some wide band of flashing light, which make the 
whole air seem ablaze. Happy is the mind which has 
long watched with gladness these moving trains of bright- 

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TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

ness and whiteness, and has realized all their impressive- 
ness. Happy is the mind which expects new life to fall at 
intervals upon our race. As centuries pass, the intervals 
will become greater and the light more divine. 

The church must be like a great literature or a great 
art, an invitation to man to come up higher. It may 
study science and love it, but it must run far beyond it and 
above it. Science is never a measurement of man or of 
his real world. It is a study of quantity not quality. 
Science says the evening clouds are only banks of wet, 
cold fog, chilly and chaotic. But the soul that sees them 
at sunset is not in those banks of fog. It is many miles 
away, and is in the realm of color, love, and thought. 
The Angelus is, in science, only some coarse cloth with 
most disagreeable grease and pigments spread over it. 
Put your face up into the green mess, and it will soil and 
sicken you. But we do not intend to get into the grease 
and stains. We intend to spiritualize the affair. We 
intend to stand back and see two noble human beings 
appear and overwhelm us with the sentiments that come 
and go in the kingdom of love and piety. So materialism 
says the rose is composed of so many parts of solids and 
fluids, but we step back from that analysis and say with 
Anakreon, 'O the rose! the rose! The favorite of the 
gods, the favorite of the summer-time!' 

Thus must the church study and love man. It must 
run far ahead of science, and while materialism is weigh- 
ing his dust, the pulpit must cry out: 'O man, man! 
The favorite of God!' If materialism wishes to push its 
face into the oil and pigments of the canvas, let it so act; 
religion must take her stand where she can see the human 
heart painted by a divine artist in a marvelous beauty. 



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AN ECLECTIC CHRISTIANITY 

The evolutionists possess this merit — that of helping all 
minds to study more the hidden nature of the world. The 
theories have awakened thought, and have broken up the 
mental repose so common to both the learned and un- 
learned. 

They have done the public a kindness in many of the 
words and phrases they have popularized. All our young 
men and women can now speak about 'environment' and 
'conditions' and 'correlation' and 'conservation of forces' 
and 'natural selection,' although the words cannot mean 
as much as once they meant, they stand now as a proof 
that all minds that think at all are looking more deeply 
into the nature of man and his planet. 

Let us carry over into the spiritual world the words 
'natural selection.' In the physical kingdom we may 
doubt the Darwinian idea. It is not certain that the fittest 
bodies will hold mastery at last, but it will be a most pleas- 
ant task to note that in the intellectual kingdom there is 
going on a perpetual selection, and that the weakest ideas 
are dying and the best are becoming more visible. But 
this selection is not that of dumb nature, but that of natural 
reason. It is nothing but a perpetual common sense act- 
ing upon all its surroundings. Xenophon told well the 
story called the 'Choice of Hercules.' Two figures called 
upon Hercules in his youth: the one offered him a life of 
simple pleasure, the other a life of usefulness and immortal 
fame. The demi-god chose the latter. The fact that the 
legend delighted the world two thousand years ago reveals 
the old popularity of the mind that could make the better 
of two possible selections. Our age is a Hercules making 
a new choice. 

After all allowances are made for existing follies, it 

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TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

remains true that the age is wonderful in its power of 
selection. All indifference is passing away; the mass of 
society moves along in an active, critical spirit, and is 
rapidly finding what is best for time and eternity. That 
enlargement of judgment, which began with Bacon, made 
society prefer liberty to kingcraft, industry to idleness, 
education to ignorance, all beauty to ugliness, and a simple 
religion to a faith almost buried in superstition. 

The history of Christianity cannot vary very much from 
the history of politics or art. The statesmen of the world 
are busy in selecting those principles that will make society 
happiest and most moral. There is a perpetual sifting 
of old statutes. In each generation mankind makes 
known the more plainly its wants, and the legislatures 
hasten to gather up these wants in the form of enactments. 
Thus the doctrines of Christianity come at the call of our 
race, and when some old call has expired, the dogma 
which the call produced falls away from the volume of 
living truth. In the midst of all this scene the tendency 
is to choose the better part that will stay with us forever. 

The method of art will illustrate the method of our 
religion. It took common genius many centuries to learn 
to paint or carve a good human face. The many features 
of the face were slow to fall into harmony. Each separate 
artist was a personal and despotic impulse, and if he had 
the right view of the forehead he was not to be trusted 
with the nose or the chin. The Egyptians seemed to have 
failed in the effort to delineate the human face. The nose 
set in too high up in the forehead ; the chin was too small. 
We do not know how many experimenting ages preceded 
the Greeks, but they evidently enjoyed the advantages of 
a long selection. As there must have been a good litera- 
ture back of Homer, so there must have been a good art 
back of Zeuxis and Phidias. But under the sky of Athens 
the final selections were great and true. The forehead 
was indeed a little too low, and the nose began too far up, 
but these errors seemed too slight to impede much the 

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AN ECLECTIC CHRISTIANITY 

fame of that noble country. In the later times of Raphael 
and Angelo, the forehead ran too high again, and the ex- 
pression of the female face tended toward a serene stu- 
pidity. Thus, in this branch of art, we perceive a selec- 
tion that was active for thousands of years. 

In the halls of modern art you will now see faces from 
which the Egyptian and Greek and Italian errors have 
fallen, and in which faces there stands much of the final 
beauty of the human countenance. The history of art is 
the history of not only a long study, but also of a long 
erasure. The beauties which now exist are few com- 
pared with the erasures that are dead and lost. Each 
beautiful idea on canvas or in marble carries in itself the 
study of many centuries, and would sadden us could it 
recall all the faces that had died that it might live. Chris- 
tian truths and doctrines reach their pre-eminence; they 
are slowly selected by the passing myriads. The favorite 
idea of some individual may be in time enthroned by the 
world or be trampled to death by the uncounted feet. 
For each true doctrine in our religion, a group of poor 
ideas have died. Some of the early Christian doctrines 
were only the efforts of peculiar individuals to stamp their 
own opinions upon society. The gloomy soul of Tertul- 
lian turned its own feelings of revenge into a theology, 
but when the average human heart sat down to think long 
over the dark theology, it rejected his thought. As it took 
the people a long time to compose in art the ideal face, 
so in theology centuries passed before Tertullian was 
sifted out of the store of Christian truth. Each time the 
public choice came to him his ideas had grown less dear. 
After a long time, when the day of selection had come 
back, he was omitted from the catalogue of guiding minds. 
He became dust. 

There is a beautiful poem, of which the burden is that 
'My own will come to me.' What ought to come will 
come, and at last the beloved dead will find the heart that 
owns them. The sentiment can be applied also to the 

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TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

Christian theology, and could it assume a living form, 
beautiful as the persons of Faith or Charity, it might sing 
over the ages, past and passing, 'My own will come to 
me!' The Tertullians, the lordly magnates, may flourish 
for a season, but at the opening of each new century my 
own will be a little nearer to me. All that is foreign to 
my Christ will fall away in the long march. At last I 
shall join my own in ties never to be broken. 

The simple doctrines of the modern church come to us 
as the choice of our race. The race is gradually selecting 
the better part. 

To any who love to look back, and from the review of a 
century pass to a review of thousands of years, it is an 
impressive scene to mark the religious heart passing here 
and there, to make its selection from fact and fable, 
things sad or things joyous. It travels in the name of all 
human society, and knows well what the heart will most 
need. There are, indeed, defects in the Old and New 
Testaments, but when the angel of religion passed over 
the wide and long home of that book it selected for our 
instruction a paradise ruined by sin; a scene of flowers 
turned into thorns; it drew a picture of a patriarch walking 
by a holy faith, and walking toward a celestial city; it 
took the portrait of a man who so walked with God that 
he did not have to go to heaven by death — he passed in 
as though wrapped in the mantle of the Almighty; it wrote 
down the history of a race that marched away from despots 
to find the sweets of liberty; it detected the eloqence of 
the book of Job; it ordained a writer of sweet psalms, 
made him the poet laureate of Judea; it heard the fervent 
entreaties of the prophets; it watched for the coming of a 
Christ; and then again it gathered lessons and hopes for 
the vast throng that was moving across the fields of life. 

The Bible is, indeed, not without errors, but it is a won- 
derful assemblage of high truths which the souls of all 
lands accept as their own. Wonderful work of eclecticism, 
in which the soul picked up its own in the dim twilight of 
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AN ECLECTIC CHRISTIANITY 

two thousand years! The whole Bible is an effort of 
society to find its God and its Savior and its final blessed- 
ness. The book contains all the sacred paths men fol- 
lowed, and all the songs they sung on the way. Their 
anthems and dirges are there. 

The most popular of hymns in our language is founded 
upon that passage in Genesis which records the sleep and 
dreams of a lonely but hopeful wanderer. The scene lies 
in the early centuries of all history. In the far-off time, 
when there was no Europe and no America, a man of 
simple faith and trust was overtaken by night and weari- 
ness, and he had to make his bed under the stars and make 
a stone into a pillow. But to such a sleeper and upon such 
a pillow came a dream of angels. They were going up 
and down on a gossamer stairway, and thus were joining 
man's shadowy earth to the rapture of paradise. This 
story the heart adopted as its own. Before our hymn- 
maker paused over it, millions of mortals had trusted that 
their God would turn their sorrow into a final joy. At last 
the emotion of our race burst forth into the words : 

' Though like a wanderer, 
The sun gone down, 
Darkness be over me, 
My rest a stone. ' 

Thus in all times society picks out what is best for it, 
and with its jewels rushes onward. It lets fall all else. It 
first clings to life, and afterward to each thing that makes 
life more dear. On the very field where this traveler saw 
his vision, there occurred afterward an event which, for 
the hour, must have seemed more tremendous than all 
others that had ever marked the plains of Padan Aram. 
Here, where the lonely dreamer had slept, marched in great 
pride a Roman army, commanded by one of the greatest 
generals under the sway of Julius Caesar. Licinius Crassus 
here entered the bloody tumult of battle. Here he met 
the red hand of destiny. The Parthians overwhelmed 
him. He left twenty thousand of his heroes dead upon 
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TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

the field. But to find this story you must turn the pages 
of obscure, dry history. A few years erased the traces of 
the battle, and left unmarked the soldiers' graves, but over 
all the lost glory of Crassus the ladder of Jacob sprang up 
again, to rise gracefully from the earth, to rest always, 
always against the eternal sky. Thus the heart knows its 
own wants. It must make a long journey whose end is 
in the grave. The journey and its ending weigh upon the 
soul heavily, and in its sad and deep inquiry it forgets the 
battle of the great Roman, and holds the stony pillow in 
perpetual reverence. 

Our age advances as a great eclectic. It is letting fall 
much, it is making new choices with a greater wisdom 
and a deeper love. Life is not a chaos like a heap of 
ruins; it is a composition, like a great picture which is an 
assemblage of chosen ideas. The tree in the picture is a 
chosen tree; the flowers in the foreground hang gracefully; 
the water is limpid, it falls in a cascade, for then is it most 
beautiful; if there are clouds, they are dreamy; if there are 
faces, they are selected from the smiling million. Thus 
our faith must not come to us any more in thoughtless, 
chaotic form. The sweep of time has not only made the 
judgment strong, but it has made the heart tender. So- 
ciety must pass over the world again, and picture out 
new details for its new canvas. Nothing can prevent this 
choice. Having strengthened the world's judgment, soci- 
ety must accept the result. The new heart will love only 
its own. Its own will come to it. 

Ye strangers who may be worshiping in a new place, 
and among strange faces, pick up truths as you would 
gather flowers. Select only those of fairest form. You 
need not always leave your church to make this final 
choice. All our churches grow many roses among their 
weeds. If you must follow any one, be the slave of only 
Jesus Christ. As an artist, place Christ's picture in the 
center of your canvas, and select all the details that will 
harmonize with that divine form. Goodness, hope, piety, 
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AN ECLECTIC CHRISTIANITY 

philanthropy, moral beauty, all must point one way as 
rays of light point to the sun. You need not try to recon- 
cile Jesus. 

You will be upon earth only a few years. Let the days 
be all days full of rich and wise choices. As the children 
in May and June emerge from the woods with their arms 
full of flowers, glad over the richness of the day, thus may 
you come to your grave and to God, with your mind and 
heart full of truths and virtue you have gathered in the 
half gloomy forest of this world. Turn away from the 
quarrels of the intellect, as from the battles of Napoleon 
and Licinius Crassus, and hasten to see the ladder of the 
old traveler with its bottom down among the grass and 
violets, and its top resting against the wall of heaven. 



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A SCIENTIFIC CHRISTIANITY 

There is gradually coming a scientific Christianity. It 
will never be as purely scientific as the railway or the 
processes in the manufactories, but it will argue from the 
basis of natural law and will repose upon reasonable 
premises much like those that were used by Sir Isaac 
Newton in his studies of the sky. 

The universe having been fashioned by the Creator, 
man was endowed with the faculty by which he could 
acquire some knowledge of the universe, and by which he 
could make use of many of its contents and potencies and 
laws. Reason is the coming name of this faculty. St. 
Paul calls it the 'logical' faculty. If a Jew or a pagan 
should offer a dead ox or goat to a deity, that might be a 
religious service; but he thought if a man should offer his 
own living body to God the service would be more logical. 
The service which a live mind and a five heart could 
render would be more reasonable than a service expressed 
by a dead turtle-dove or a dead lamb. The service of a 
living mind and body would fall under the head of prem- 
ises and conclusions, and would help compose a scientific 
religion. 

All that man uses and enjoys has come from the logical 
faculty acting upon the material supplied by the earth or 
by the universe. There was once a race which so studied 
causes and effects in copper and tin mixed that its period 
was called the bronze age. The museums of the world 
are well supplied with the relics of that lost age and lost 
art. In the prehistoric times this human being was a 
reasoner, for in the lake villages, now submerged in the 
waters all around Geneva, in Europe, there is seen the 
calm and patient toiling from premises to conclusions, or 
from causes to results. 

128 



A SCIENTIFIC CHRISTIANITY 

This is that human creature that is, in each generation, 
becoming more logical in religion. Man is related to the 
universe by his rational faculty. When he does not know 
the cause, he tries to invent one. 

If the laws of the universe were not constant, man's 
reason would be of little value. When he discovers that 
water can be changed into steam, he may safely build an 
engine, for water will do so next year. We know that 
Abraham might have employed a steam engine, had he 
only known of such an instrument, for what fire, water, 
and a boiler would do now, they would have done six 
thousand years ago. Man's studies all take place in an 
unchanging world, and therefore the logic of to-day will 
be the logic of to-morrow. 

Man stands related by his reason to every corner of 
the universe. He is even taking photographs of the 
nebula?, and of the fires in the sun. Although the sun is 
ninety-three million miles distant, the process of Professor 
Hale took pictures of those flames which shot out from 
the moon's shadow like the spikes of a crown. 

When man is thus viewed, as related to all the world 
and to all worlds, he ceases to belong to the common ani- 
mal kingdom. As a creature he is gigantic. If the uni- 
verse came from God, and each law is only a divine wish, 
then man's reason is only a power to read the language of 
the Creator. Logic can detect the wishes of the infinite. 
Logic is the ship in which man sails the infinite sea. 
Reason is the discover} 7 of paths to ends, but the reason of 
the Indian noted the paths which led to the fields where 
the bison roamed; or to some spring; or to some river 
where he could spear fish. By as much as reason ad- 
vanced, it made a greater path to a greater end; and soon 
we find the white man devising avenues that lead to edu- 
cation, art, happiness, and liberty. The Indian pursuing 
his trail, and Washington crossing the Delaware, are 
pictures within the confines of logic, cause, and effect, 
only Washington is pursuing a greater path to a greater 
129 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

termination. All these dissimilar events illustrate the 
philosophy of man and his world, and declare that, from 
youth to old age, from barbarism to the highest culture, 
he is to draw his life from his logical faculty. This is the 
faculty that dispersed the deep night of the dark ages, and 
made the new centuries come. The scene may well re- 
mind us of the picture of Guido, in which the shadow is 
trying to fly away from the rising sun. The beautiful 
hours stand around the day, and seem to warn the twi- 
light to haste lest she may soon be crushed by the sun's 
chariot. Thus reason came rushing along, and the dark 
ages ran away as if to find in some other realm a place for 
their mental night. 

The classic book used to tell us that Lucifier was the 
great light-bearer. He was painted and carved, as if 
bearing a torch. Before he fell, he was the great light- 
sprinkler. But all is changed now. Our life is all logi- 
cal. It is all reasonable. It came flashing out from such 
torches as Luther and Bacon and Newton and Milton 
and a group too numerous to be named and too great to be 
portrayed. The human mind itself became luminous. 
Its reason turned into life. It has illuminated three cen- 
turies, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth, 
and with a beam forever growing more brilliant. It does 
not now seem as though darkness could ever again spread 
her pall over a world so bright. Reason has, with her 
right hand, pulled all of Europe and all of England out of 
the dark ages. It has remade all poetry, all art, all poli- 
tics; it has fashioned all the sciences; it has made the old 
alchemist, who was seeking an elixir of life, become a 
Faraday or a Morse; it has made the old astrologer leave 
his fortune-telling and become a Newton or a Herschel; 
it has compelled the world, which burned women as 
witches, to fling open college doors to our sisters; it has 
compelled kings to discharge their liveried flatterers and 
surround themselves with statesmen ; it has taken the state 
away from the will of a man, and has founded it upon prin- 
130 



A SCIENTIFIC CHRISTIANITY 

ciples. The same science that underlies chemistry under- 
lies our nation. 

When the men around Pascal were asking why a fluid 
will rise in an empty tube, they concluded the cause to be 
that nature hates a vacuum. Pascal laughed at the 
monks. He said nature could not hate either an empty 
tube or a full one; so he went onward, and found that the 
pressure of the atmosphere caused the fluids to rise in a 
vacuum. Thus reason brought society a translation of 
an old, mysterious sentence. It deciphered the writing 
on the empty tube. 

Those eight or nine Christian centuries which, between 
the ninth and the fourteenth, sunk like a second Atalantis, 
went down because reasoning had become a lost art. The 
Romans had slain the Greeks; vices and the Goths then 
slew the Romans, and over these ruins, speaking a lot of 
new tongues, crept some degenerate children of the Chris- 
tian church with thoughts and writings which never touched 
our world at any point. The classics had thought deeply 
upon human rights and duties; Cicero and Tacitus re- 
sembled closely our Macaulay and our Charles Sumner. 
Virgil wrote on agriculture with all the realism of modern 
times; but in the sixth century, the last classic school in 
Europe closed its doors, and the intellectual world was 
turned over on the Saints Patrick, Margaret, and Agnes. 
When these persons wished for information, they fell asleep 
and dreamed out whole volumes of biography and history. 
Thus all the logic of Athens and Rome perished, and 
Agnes and St. Patrick came to the front. Then the cen- 
turies following began to sink. In the confessions of St. 
Augustine, which compose quite a large volume, there is 
certainly not one page that pertains to human civilization. 
Robbed of its cause and support, all Europe became sub- 
merged. 

Reason came at last, and lifted up those sunken centu- 
ries. It changed savage dialects into languages. It took 
all the Agneses and Augustines to heaven and issued a 
131 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

call for men to come who could write the truths of hu- 
manity. With Bacon, Milton, and Shakespeare, the sub- 
merged nations began to rise. On an enormous scale, the 
scene was like the return of the prodigal. Europe in its 
rags and poverty, said, 'I will arise and go to my Father/ 
Dreadful absence! reaching over eight centuries of swine, 
hunger, and rags! 

If logic or reason thus holds in its hand the fountain 
and happiness of society, it must hold in its hand also the 
destiny of religion, and in a logical world you must have, 
sooner or later, a logical faith. Our Christianity must 
rapidly become scientific. A scientific man can no more 
love an unscientific religion than a musical mind can love 
discord. A logical age will rally around a logical religion. 
If it professes love for anything else, its friendship will 
be cold. The heart knows and loves its own. 

When one speaks of a scientific religion, one cannot 
imply one that is purely such. The sciences of chemis- 
try and botany and astronomy are not purely such. After 
Newton has made all his estimates, and has written out 
all his formulie, he still finds a place for a God ; and when 
a student of botany has classified all the plants, he can 
end his task by worshiping the Creator, who is the final 
explanation of all the blossoming foreground. Thus all 
the sciences fling open the gate of truth to admit the Deity. 
They simply follow laws as far as laws will lead. We do 
not expect figs of thistles because there is a God, but 
we expect figs of fig-trees because there is a God, and 
grapes of vines because there is a Deity. 

Thus God and Jesus Christ may be the soul and center 
of a scientific religion, because the logical or scientific 
faculty can gather up all that part or religion that is de- 
termined by natural law. An arena remains for the pres- 
ence and action of a Providence. We shall not ask the 
eagle to sing the song of the robin or the nightingale. We 
know that God made the song, but logic makes us attach 
a certain joyous melody, not to the eagle, but to the robin 

132 



A SCIENTIFIC CHRISTIANITY 

or the lark. Thus our science is full of realism, at the 
same time full of worship. 

The wave of science or reason or logic will roll on and 
sweep us all onward toward the ideal truth. The Chris- 
tian church can travel in only one direction — that is, toward 
truth and Christ. There it will meet all human need and 
all piety. All other paths are closed. They will never be 
opened again. 

Science, reason, logic, and law are one force, constant 
and irresistible. They are a form of Providence, they are 
the action of God. Therefore Paul said: 'Come to your 
logical service.' Your baptism is an emblem, your atti- 
tudes only shadows of some virtue, your slain lambs are 
only pictures of a sentiment. Come with your life, your 
thoughts, and offer to God a reasonable service. By 
science the arches of the temple rise, by laws the plants 
grow, by science the organ pours forth music, by law the 
grape hangs on the vine; so by law man can come to God 
and humanity. Do not come by baptism, or by any 
type or shadow, but come only as a living, thinking soul. 
Come by an invitation of Jesus Christ — that gate of both 
logic and pearl. 

There is nothing alarming in this march of inexorable 
law. Of course it is inexorable, and works forever, for 
how can God change? Why should He ever wish the 
grape to grow on the thorn, or the fig on the thistle ? Is 
it not enough that the grape and the vine are wedded for all 
eternity? Science will follow us until we shall find the 
good, the beautiful, and the true. It will carry us or lead 
us. Some bereaved and lonely hearts feel sad that the 
dead do not come back. They say, 'Lo! twenty years 
have passed, and the face once loved does not come back 
to me !' How can the dead come back ? They are mov- 
ing in another direction. Twenty years from now will 
the thistle bear figs ? All our dead friends are moving 
onward. How can change come in God's law? This 
law, this science of the Almighty, is not cruel : it is beau- 
133 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

tiful, it is sublime. The dead cannot come back to us. 
We must go to them. Thus there is a religion all over- 
flowing with science. It contains the providence of God; 
its central figure and truth is Jesus of Nazareth; its duties 
are all valuable to mankind; its character is righteous; its 
love infinite; its destiny is a happy earth, and then a still 
happier heaven. 



134 



THE INTERVENING GOD 

Man has not been long in life before he has learned 
to love it very deeply. When a child he loves his existence 
indeed, but he does not value and measure it as he does 
when, at thirty or forty, his mind has reached some ability 
to comprehend the soul and its marvelous actions in con- 
scious being. Mrs. Sigourney once wrote a beautiful 
poem on a boy that was dying at the age of eight years, 
but the reader can see that all deep and tender measure- 
ments of the poem came from the mature poetess, and 
not from the fading child. 

Man's existence is something so large and mysterious 
that he never fully sounds its depths, and at fifty or sixty 
he is more than ever overwhelmed with the fact that he 
lives. In the very early years he does not seem strange 
to be moving to and fro, eating, sleeping, waking, walking, 
laughing, singing, or speaking, working, playing, enjoy- 
ing; but as the years pass the strangeness of the situation 
grows more and more evident. What pleases in child- 
hood fills with awe the later years. The facts of hands 
and feet and a mind are enough to the school-boy, but 
to such facts all the later years add a long and deep pon- 
dering. 

The love of our world grows along with this growing 
mystery. The whole scene is not much like a Waterloo, 
and the common hearts are not much like those two great 
masters of troops. The fields may be blossoming and 
full of multiform beauty, and the heart may be reading, 
or talking, or singing, but still the whole surroundings 
are so tremendous that the heart can not but wish that 
some friend or some answer would come. According to 
the gospel of Jesus, and to the highest philosophy of men, 
God is the needed intervention. In this strange and 
135 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

sweet battle-field the heart can say to itself, ' Oh, that God 
would come!' 

God is the great and needed intervention. If He 
canvasses the earth in behalf of the plants that do not 
toil nor spin, which do nothing but blossom, much more 
is He the mediator for the higher orders of life. If He 
cannot neglect a lily, how can He slight the human heart ? 
The plants and flowers are not conscious of any inter- 
vening power. The sunshine, the soil, the raindrops, are 
all unknown to them. They are the constant recipients 
of an unknown love. When the mind passes to a higher 
form of organism — that of the bird, the deer, the horse — 
it finds no sense of dependence, no inquiry about who 
made the grains and the grass. The wild deer eats the 
tender leaves, but it does not ask for any origin of the 
bushes or the forest. All the swarms of life below man are 
cared for by an unknown love. Reaching man we find 
the scene all changed. A strange consciousness appears 
and a strange intellect that in the wonders of a battle-field, 
sad or beautiful, can cry out, Oh, that God would come! 
The argument of Jesus was, that if God intervenes in 
behalf of the lily, He must intervene for humanity. He 
is not a God of blossoms only, but of men. 

Is He upon earth in person ? We cannot affirm or 
deny. We do not know the meaning of the words 'in 
person' when they are applied to the infinite God. The 
word 'spirit' has undergone a great enlargement in late 
years. Instead of involving it in ruin, science has crowned 
it. Never was Christianity more spiritual than it is to- 
day. Our ancestors thought of the Creator as being a large 
king. He had hands and eyes. He was lord of war. 
He was centrally located, and had millions of messengers 
that did his will. All this physical imagery moved forward 
unchecked until it reached our century. Here the hu- 
manized Deity was set free from material. Instead of 
destroying the world's God, science did us all a great 
service by detaching the Creator from the phenomena 

136 



THE IN TERVENING GOD 

of material things. Science has made more visible an 
infinite gulf as yawning between mind and the earthly 
substances. All the great scientific students have in some 
manner confessed that there is something within the 
universe besides what they have found. While they were 
raising up a material world, which many feared would 
become a tower, from whose summit the sky would be 
invaded or pulled down, behold there arose silently a 
spiritual world, whose height is above all other heights, 
whose shafts sparkle in infinity. Never had man a more 
spiritual religion than that of our period. This blessed 
result comes partly from the fact that science has beaten 
the dust out of it. God as a spirit can easily be here. 
The same study that has made soul rise up above the 
rocks, and the ground, and the water, has discovered a 
physical world a thousand times more refined than that 
of the Hebrews and the Greeks. No one knows what 
light is, but all know that something comes from the sun, 
and comes two hundred thousand miles in a second. If 
light is an undulation, something must undulate. A 
cause produces its effect ninety-three millions of miles 
away, and causes this effect in eight minutes. Recently 
some students in England joined in a boat-race. The 
result was told in America in five seconds after the race 
had been won. That which came from England in five 
seconds was a material traveler. The angel that thus 
flew over the Atlantic was not a spirit. It could not 
think, love, or remember, or hope. Its wings and power 
were made of earthly things. The messenger was not 
like the Mercury who did errands for the Olympian gods. 
That errand boy had wings on his feet, and had not far 
to go. This nineteenth-century Mercury is made out of 
wire, zinc, copper, and sulphuric acid, and thus con- 
structed, can fly from Oxford to Boston in five seconds. 
Thus the material world has been revealed as having an un- 
dreamed-of delicacy. It moves away, softening and grow- 
ing delicate as it runs, but it never seems to come any 

137 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

nearer to that other something that thinks and speaks. 
Electricity is a very fine substance, and so is light, but 
neither of them can come any nearer than a log of wood can 
come to saying, ' I love, ' ' I remember. ' Between even 
the delicate sunbeams and the mind, a great gulf yawns. 
The delicate sunbeams can fall into the white or pink 
silks and satins of the Easter flowers, but, thus meeting, 
the light and the blossoms cannot say, 'Oh, that God 
would come!' If material substances can so journey, 
what must be the wonders of the spirit ? 

Materialism cannot span the gulf between matter and 
mind. It can make both banks more charming, but it 
can not occupy the gulf between. As the gardeners and 
farmers can make the shores of America and France more 
beautiful, can drive back the wild beast, and redouble 
the vines, palms, and harvest on either shore, but can not 
fill up the intervening Atlantic, so modern thought can 
trace dust until it becomes a ray of light, or a wave of 
electric ether, and it can think of mind long and tenderly, 
but it can not fill up the separating ocean. 

A resident of this city taught a little spider to come at 
his call and receive its crumb of food. The creature's 
body was not larger than a seed of flax, its head was almost 
invisible. In that head was a mind. This spider soon 
learned to emerge from its little woven chamber and 
watch all the motions of human kindness. After two 
weeks of such friendship, the little eye would detect its 
friend and would hasten out from its parlor, and stand 
on that edge of its web which was nearest to its new-found 
human world. Here in this microscopic brain were mem- 
ory and hope — not, indeed, the memory of history and 
poetry, but the memory of yesterday's kindness; hope — 
not of office or of immortality, but the hope of seeing its 
friend and its food. What can science do with such 
phenomena of mind ? How powerless are all our labora- 
tories to make that spider's mind a part of the world's 
dust! 

138 



THE IN TERVENING GOD 

Not far from the mind of man, and not far from the 
mind of bird or deer, stands the thrilling mystery of a 
God. All life has its rights and its awful mystery. Man- 
kind should stand in reverence on the shore of a sea no 
intellect can cross. All civilization asks for the divine life 
of Jesus, and all our science asks for the intervention of 
a God. Our age has followed the paths of both matter 
and mind to an end; it has gone as far as reason can go, 
and now it more and more asks the Deity to come between. 
The ocean between the two shores is composed of the 
Deity. 

While this great spirit is removed from human sight 
and touch, reason appears on the scene as God's will. 
Should it use its powers to the utmost and then obey its 
decrees, what a society earth would soon possess ! There 
may have been other revelations of the Divine will, but 
these were in the name of some one truth of hope or prac- 
tice; but reason is a perpetual voice, a revelation of ten 
thousand duties, joys, and hopes. 

Reason has gone further still. It has led man from 
idleness to industry; it has made him prefer beauty to 
deformity; it has made him prefer a dwelling-house to a 
cave in the ground; it has made him study nature and 
enjoy the red cheek won under the sunbeams, and in the 
pure air; it has written down for man laws of health, con- 
duct, and religion, and in all manners and times has been 
man's greatest friend. What folly it is of the human 
heart that can transform this amazing friend into an 
enemy of our race! Reason studied and obeyed will 
lead a child from the cradle up to a most noble manhood 
or womanhood; it will lead a nation from barbarism to 
a civilization better than any history contains. It will not 
discard a single truth, it will not mar the name or work 
of Christ, it will hand Him over to the people in a form 
more beautiful than any He has worn since He died upon 
the cross. When reason shall touch the cross, its wood 
will become gold. 

139 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

Oh reason, thou strange revelation whose volume is 
never to be closed! To new generations, new pages will 
be turned by human fingers yet to come; over those new 
pages, eyes not yet in the realm of our sunbeams will shed 
tears of joy. If the many denominations of Christendom 
shall ever find a unity of faith and love, they will come 
to this harmony by reason's converging paths. Reason 
scatters chaff to the winds, and gamers the golden wheat. 
It is the great ideal angel who spoke in the proverbs of 
Solomon, and who acted as the indwelling voice in 
Socrates. Under the name of Mentor it took care of the 
kingdom of Ithaca. Under that name Minerva acted 
some of her divine parts in the drama of life, and back 
the name came in later times, in an eloquent story by 
Fenelon. It is wiser than all the theologians of the church. 
It can create statesmen and republics, and can compel 
the infidel or the skeptic to mingle tears and hopes with 
his doubts. 

What is this reason that seems the representative of 
our God ? It is not the power that demonstrates alone, 
but the power that also weighs probabilities and that 
accepts not simply a positive certainty, but also a noble 
hope. The larger part of reason's work is done among 
the probabilities in man's life. It being confessed that 
the universe has two hemispheres — the one material, the 
other spiritual — there must be probabilities on either 
shore, and therefore reason must be just as busy with the 
world's spirit as it is with the world's dust. In a recent 
essay on Mr. Tyndall, Herbert Spencer says: 'He was 
unusually conscious that all physical inquiry leads to 
metaphysics. ' Spirit, then, is just as real as dust. The 
mind of the little spider is just as real as its web. Reason, 
therefore, must study the data of the spiritual hemisphere 
and deduce from them all the high inferences the facts 
will bear. The universe was too large for Humboldt 
and Darwin. They lingered on one shore. So the life- 
long musician cares little for the picture or the statue. 
140 



THE IN TERVENINO GOD 

The sun dims the stars, but the stars are there in their 
eternal places. Unable to know and love all the human 
race, man loves those that stand nearest. 

Society can never afford to follow a specialist. Had 
the Greeks followed Phidias, they would have had nothing 
but statues. Had our age followed Beethoven, we should 
have now nothing but sonatas. Had we followed Napo- 
leon, we should all be soldiers, and have nothing but war. 
Should we follow Darwin alone, at the nightfall of life 
we should be sitting down by a basket full of fossil ferns 
or fishes, dried blossoms and dead leaves. The specialist 
can add to civilization, but he cannot make it. The 
jeweler can fashion a diamond for a human form, but 
can not make a beautiful face or a beautiful soul; the 
special student can add some truth or law to civilization, 
but he can not supply all the thoughts and emotions of an 
impressive age. 

The wants of a community are also the wants of each 
separate mind. Man cannot live for dust alone for he 
is in part soul. He cannot live for the soul alone, for he 
is in part dust. In some strange way dust and spirit 
mingle. Christ and the lilies met. There was no war 
between that religion and that science. Those blossoms 
did not say : We are the children of a future age ; a com- 
ing age of cellular structure and physical forces. Could 
they have spoken they would in truth have said: 'Oh, 
Son of God, we, too, are the lilies of God. There is in us 
a mysterious life. Thou livest on the shore of immortality, 
we on the shore of time, but we are fed by the same inter- 
vening love. Thou didst utter the tremendous laws 
which the world calls the Sermon of the Mount, we are 
far below in wisdom and eloquence, but we proclaim the 
mankind prevalence of a spirituality, a delicacy, a refine- 
ment, a purity akin to the virtues seen in Thee. In us 
matter and spirit do not conflict. The dust in us only 
holds our purity up to the gaze of mortals. Science and 
religion are no more at war than the face of Madonna or 
141 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

Beatrice was at war with her soul. The face needed the 
spirit, and the spirit the face. We are the blossoms of 
God.' 

The Easter Sunday arose in Christianity, but it does 
not reach its noon there, and its star will never set. What 
began in Christ now reason espouses. Arguing from 
the spirit onward, reason asks for a second life. It says 
the greatest fact upon earth is that of mind. Man is 
evidently a child of the skies. Reason cannot contemplate 
him ; cannot mark the brevity of his life, and contrast that 
brevity with his powers and ambition; cannot note his 
love of existence ; cannot count his tears ; cannot behold his 
virtues, his love, his friendships without bespeaking for 
him a greater and a longer existence. Reason says an 
Everlasting Father would want his children to be long- 
lived. He would not hurry Christ and all the holy ones 
back to dust. Life so awful, so great, so blessed, ought 
to be long. 

Reason comes on this holy day, and asks for a part of 
the hymns and flowers. Science comes. It sees the 
gulf which only the Deity can explain. It bows and says 
to religion, 'Give me some of your lilies!' Blessed 
period that which at last will appear in our world, when 
reason and science and religion shall alike look upward 
and see, all resplendent, a world of human immortality 
and of God! 



142 



THE FULLNESS OF MODERN 
CIVILIZATION 

In the Holland room of our picture gallery may be 
seen a group of girls dressed in white, and singing around 
a piano. Happy and beautiful faces are they, although 
they are the faces of orphans. The music they are sing- 
ing is marked Psalm 146, verse 9: 'The Lord taketh 
care of the stranger; He preserves the fatherless. ' That 
one painting is a sermon expressed in a language more 
beautiful than words; and yet that picture is small and 
narrow compared with the one which the one hundred 
and fourth psalm would demand were its ideas assembled 
upon canvas. Its thoughts would fill a gallery with scenes 
sweet or sublime. Nature and human life, the sea, the 
forest, the sky, the birds, the rocks, the ships, the trem- 
bling earth, the smoking hills, the setting sun, the rising 
moon, would each ask for place in the high eloquence of art. 

The first thought awakened by such a gallery created 
out of a single Hebrew poem might well be this: What a 
breadth there is to our civilization! What an infinite 
number of ideas is contained in the highest order of the 
modern manhood ! Once the soul asked for only one or 
two objects of utility or beauty; the modern great races 
attempt to hold everything in the heart; they demand that 
the world be flung down at their feet. 

The same race that wrote the matchless psalms would 
not permit any paintings or statuary of ideal manhood or 
womanhood. Escaping from the Egyptian worship of 
images, Moses thought the best thing he could do was to 
prevent the painter and sculptor from making an appear- 
ance in the Jewish world. He therefore passed the law 
that no one should make any likeness of anything in heaven 
143 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

or upon the earth. Tacitus says that in consequence of 
this law no statue was to be seen in Jerusalem in home or 
temple. But if that old Judea did not dare make pictures, 
it dared write down ideas which could burst out into pic- 
tures in a wider and greater period. Our broader civili- 
zation can take one line of Hebrew poetry and then ask six 
orphan girls to gather around a piano, and compel the 
old words to turn into compassion's tears. We love the 
painted images, and bow down to worship the strange 
mingling of the human and the divine. The problem 
with Moses was how to entice his people away from the 
local vices of his period ; the problem of our day is how to 
find all virtues and beauties and happiness possible to 
mankind. Moses wanted something, we want every- 
thing. 

It becomes more evident, in each separate stage of 
human progress, that our world and our race came from 
an infinite Author. The more society thinks and dis- 
courses, the more it feels that the unknown is greater than 
the known. Many of the old limitations are broken down 
that man may enlarge the arena of his soul. If God saw 
fit to make an infinite world, man must make some effort 
to appreciate at least the works of an infinite wisdom. 
We have no right to treat with contempt the plant that 
blooms or the bird that sings. 

Perhaps the stage, long so despised and denounced by 
some, contains a form of most legitimate art. It may be 
a combination of picture and action and speech, three or 
four arts in one. If children dancing around a May-pole 
become to us an essay or a poem on the matchless beauty 
of spring, perhaps there are thousands of ideas which are 
made more impressive by the setting in life. As the jew- 
eler can set diamonds so as to make a ring, a bracelet, or 
a coronet, so the gifted actors and their stage can take an 
idea, a sentiment, and set in such a manner that it will 
fill the intellect or entrance the heart. 

The existence of mind is not a great fact unless there 
144 



MODERN CIVILIZATION 

can be an expression of mind. The mind is invisible. We 
cannot hear it, or touch it. A person asleep is a mind, 
but it is not an available intellect. The value of the mind 
sets in when the sleep passes away and expression begins. 
God, without any universe, is inconceivable. The uni- 
verse is God's language. It is his beauty, his philosophy, 
his music, his painting, his statuary, his infinite utterance. 
There the human mind finds its destiny and triumph, not 
in sleep, but in its utterance. As painting, sculpture, 
architecture, poetry, and all literature are only the speech 
of the spirit, so the drama is one more effort of the intellect 
to surround itself with a universe. 

If a child in friendship gives you a rose, the outreaching 
hand and the smile of the child are part of the language, 
and the offering. If the child smiles sweetly, the smile is 
as delightful as the flower. But beware how you admit 
this, for this is the drama. A poet can speak of a flower; 
the drama reaches out to us the same blossom with a 
human hand and a human smile. Horace says that, 
'sorrowful words are strengthened by a sorrowful face, 
and happy words by a happy face.' The drama is one of 
the many efforts of the mind to express its thoughts and 
emotions. 

One fact is now most evident — that our civilization has 
become very wide, and is constantly admitting new thought 
and new pleasures and new duties. It can never be nar- 
rowed again. The problem of the new epoch is to make 
the river as pure as it is broad. Its breadth comes almost 
unsought, but its purity asks for watchfulness and labor. 
This matter of expression is not the law of good minds 
only, but of low intellects as well; therefore, when the art 
of writing came and men of genius began to compose noble 
books, then came also the coarse, the lost souls, to find 
utterance through written language. With the accumu- 
lation and value of property came theft, forgery, and all 
fraud, so through literature and the arts came the power 
to express all forms of depravity. As fire is a good friend 
145 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

and a bad enemy, so each art easily becomes the enemy of 
the world. The welfare of mankind will not come from 
the breadth of its civilization alone, but from the purity of 
the stream. In an age when thoughts roll in like a flood, 
the age must redouble its efforts to make the intellectual 
world as beautiful as it is wide. 

The Greeks had few landscapes. Many of their pic- 
tures introduced the supernatural. The modern gallery is 
many times wider than these of old Greece or modern 
Italy. In it we stand encompassed by thoughts. We are 
no longer in the Greek world, nor in the Anglo realm. We 
are in God's world, and the hills full of sheep or cattle, the 
orchard full of blossoms, the ships on the sea, the teacher 
and her pupils, the home, the garden, the greetings, the 
partings, have all come into art to flaunt their beauties be- 
tween the pictures of heroes and all the old pomp of battle 
and death. The progress that has swept society along 
toward a greater liberty, a greater language, has carried it 
into a greater art. If also a greater religion has come, one 
that can present the most diversity into one harmony, 
one that can assemble the most men in one simple faith, 
such a wide religion is only what one should expect who 
passes through long avenues of pictures. As we say, Oh, 
art, how numberless are thy thoughts! so must we say, 
Oh, piety, how numberless are thine altars! how many- 
voiced is thy faith ! 

Once literature did not admit children. All eloquence 
and prose and poetry clung to adults, and to only a few of 
those persons. In order to enter literature it was necessary 
to be a king or a prince or a general, or the queen of an 
empire or of beauty. The present age saw literature open 
its gate to let children rush in. Scarcely has any modern 
poet passed through his flowery fields without having said 
some blessed words to children. 

Those old portals of aristocracy, which would never 
admit any man who followed an industrial pursuit, have, 
of late, been fastened open that noble inventors and dis- 
146 



MODERN CIVILIZATION 

coverers and artisans may enter in, and the fame of states- 
men or President awaits the manhood which once learned 
wisdom by reflecting in the silence of shop or farm. A 
farmer's cart may turn into a chariot, a furrow in a field 
may become a road 'that leads to Rome.' Walls are not 
built around towns or cities. The separate states are like 
only so many fields of wheat. 

If the religious conventions in the land would now pass 
resolutions of love for the humane societies of the nation, 
love for the laboring classes, love for the exiled Jews, love 
for the religious in art, and the charities, and the amenities 
of modern life, they would soon have their churches full 
to the doors with the happy children of our race. In Hyde 
Park, London, hundreds of birds of all color and song are 
seen to follow the form that feeds them. Thersites, the 
Greek quarreler, is forgotten; Plato is held in eternal 
remembrance. It is the breadth of Christ's love that makes 
Him the everlasting foundation of the church. 

But whence come all the pictures and wonders of the 
one hundred and fourth psalm ? They came from a poet 
who was attempting to find in all places the footprints of 
a God. Thus, when we see civilization flinging open new 
gates, always growing broader and richer, redoubling the 
subjects and the beauty of each act, finding more of justice 
and more of goodness, perpetually exalting man, putting 
nobler thoughts into his mind, and assigning more blessed 
tasks to his hands, the feeling comes with wonderful power 
that our world came indeed from a wise and loving God. 
All that we see of skill and beauty is only His language. 
In all these years He speaks to us, saying, I am your God, 
and ye are my children. The wider our civilization, the 
grander our Christian faith. 



147 



'A THOUSAND HAPPY YEARS' 

The New Testament writers were so transported by 
their new experiences and new life that they thought all 
the old empires would fall at the sound of some trumpet, 
and that a world full of wrong and vice at sunset would 
be full of joy and virtue the next morning. The whole 
age believed in wonderful events more than in the slow 
processes of natural law. 

If inspiration and the presence of Christ gave the 
disciples and the apostles their direction and zeal, that 
new impulse did not tell them how many days or years 
would pass before vice would be dethroned and virtue 
crowned. Jesus Christ gave his disciples a new heart, 
but he gave them no date for a golden age. 

The eighteen hundred years that have passed since 
those early Christians stood watching the sky to mark 
the coming of the Redeemer's chariot cannot but teach 
us to expect God's kingdom to come by the slow unfold- 
ing and working of natural law. 

An elevation and inspiration the most divine will not 
utter any details about common or uncommon events. 
The holy men of old were told in what paths to walk, but 
it was not told them how far the paths were to run. It 
was the human zeal and hope that said, These paths 
will bring us to heaven in the morning. 

Having given up the providence of detached events 
we must all pass over to the providence of law. The 
walls of despotism will not fall by the blowing of horns, 
the school-house bell has more potency. The Red Sea 
will not part for an army, the growth of education and 
freedom will dissolve the armies on the sea's banks and 
turn the soldiers into farmers or scholars. The sun will 
not pause over a battle-field, the age of intellect will sow 
148 



'A THOUSAND HAPPY YEARS' 

the battle-field with wheat, and will ask of the sun only 
the regular rising and setting of summer and winter. An 
event uses God for only a day, but law needs God every- 
where and forever. With the ancients God was like a 
crash of thunder, an earthquake, but we have drifted into 
years in which God is like the light and the atmosphere — 
the perpetual accompaniment of man. 

All we know in reference to a golden age is that the 
human mind and heart are growing larger and somewhat 
more virtuous. Crime and vice in society still make dif- 
ficult the life of the optimist, but it is easy to believe that 
a little of moral success will make success more easy, as 
the second million of dollars is more easily gained than 
the first. The reign of law does not imply an advance 
always sluggish. Science came by law, but it came more 
rapidly in the latest times, and ran over more space in this 
century than it passed over in the ten centuries that pre- 
ceded. Culture and morality coming by the laws of 
education and experience may quicken their pace in the 
future, and make the twentieth or the twenty-first century 
many times as brilliant and moral as the times in which 
we live. Each new modern century comes clothed with 
additional power. It holds the past more perfectly, and 
then elicits more and more out of the present. Law 
would just as willingly fly like a bird as creep like a snail. 
Having exchanged a spasmodic world for one of natural 
law, we need not expect the new wheels to run slowly. 

Nothing in the whole universe is more religious than 
the perpetual operation of law. The human eye is no 
less wonderful because it has seen the spring come ever 
since it opened its leaves for Solomon and Homer; no less 
wonderful because tears have come to it ever since the 
first grave was opened in the earth's grass; no less won- 
derful the ear from the fact that it has heard the sea, the 
thunder, and the bird song ever since the days of Job, 
and has listened to music ever since the first hand of 
woman touched the first harp-strings; no less wonderful 

149 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

the mind from the fact that it has thought, reasoned, and 
spoken for unnumbered ages; no less wonderful the heart 
because centuries and ages have witnessed its love, its 
ambitions, its hopes. Indeed, the long flight of time car- 
ries man and nature out into immensity, and makes them 
more worthy of a deity before whom we can go with our 
prayers. One brilliant sunset might amaze us, but the 
feeling of admiration deepens when we remember that 
the people around Christ had seen the evening clouds all 
red; one moonlight night might charm us, but the charm 
is doubled when we remember that Virgil, two thousand 
years ago, watched the moon pass behind clouds and then 
burst forth again. Time is one of the greatest friends 
of piety. If one springtime cannot convert our hearts, 
before a million springtimes our knees may well bend; 
and if one autumn cannot lead us to become worshipers, 
let us not give up, but shed our tears of faith and hope 
among those colored leaves that have rustled under the 
feet of all the men and nations which are now dead. 

Natural law and long time being the true friends of 
Christianity, the glory of the human race must be ex- 
pected along those paths. But the chariot of progress 
may quicken its pace; creeping at first like a snail, the 
mind may soon be like a dove. 

The scene now before us is that of a much larger intel- 
lect and a slightly improved heart. The intellect always 
was in advance of the heart. Men know the right long 
before they will perform it. Mental power comes long 
in advance of the moral power. In our city of a million 
not one person in the whole million believes that such a 
metropolis should be governed by men of an infinite un- 
fitness for the task, but such men are chosen from time 
to time because the universal intelligence is many years 
in advance of the public morality. We all know 
what is right, but our moral force is a long distance be- 
hind our judgment. In no age have knowledge and 
action traveled together. Lord Bacon uttered more wisdom 

150 



<A THOUSAND HAPPY YEARS' 

than he could live. So did Shakespeare. His forehead 
was in the clouds, his character in the mire. The intellect 
of Goethe won laurels which were never flung down in 
the path of his life. All these men, joined by thousands 
as great, recall the old reproach flung at Athens : That it 
had wheat and moral laws, but the wheat alone it could 
use. Athens could eat better than it could live. The 
youth says : ' Drinking is a bad habit, but give me another 
glass. ' So our intelligence says : ' All cities should be 
governed by great men, but for the present bring on your 
thieves. ' The intellect grows great more rapidly than 
the heart grows powerful. The virtues of which Bacon 
and Shakespeare sang began to come along after the 
writers were in their graves. The intellect can fly, virtue 
goes on foot. 

The enlightened intellect helps virtue, but it cannot 
make a sudden perfection. All scholarship is an impedi- 
ment to vice, but not its sudden overthrow; thus showing 
us that the chariot of learning outruns the wheels of 
righteousness. 

The man of Nazareth would make a wonderful revolu- 
tion in our world if He should persuade us all to live up 
to our knowledge. If the mind believes in temperance, 
in justice, in benevolence, in industry, in perfect honor, 
in physical and moral beauty, then all that remains is to 
make each day overflow with the obedience of these rich 
truths. Christ would be a divine friend could He do 
away with the distance between human philosophy and 
human life. He need not check the understanding, He 
need only help the heart to catch up. The matchless 
beauty of Jesus lay not chiefly in the ethics which was 
stored in his mind — an ethics so perfect, so universal, so 
divine — but it lay also in the fact that His philosophy did 
not outrun His soul. His oratory was the photograph of 
His life. His voice was like the murmur of the sea, 
which is not nearly so great as the sea itself. His words 
were few, His conduct vast. We reverse the picture and 
151 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

follow our gigantic philosophy with a microscopic life. 
And yet the fact that we excel the negroes and the Indians 
proves that when the mind climbs to a height, the heart 
also creeps up out of the valley. In the Son of God the 
intellect and the soul were companions. They were in- 
separable. The wreaths for the forehead of Jesus were 
wreaths for the heart. Great men, like Emerson, Whittier, 
and Gladstone, are persons in whom mind and heart are 
both one. In Jesus the thought could not outrun the 
love. 

The widening culture of our age is not a millennium, 
but it is the inevitable fore-runner of a happy period. 
The intellect of to-day is the broadest the human race has 
yet enjoyed. The journal of Pepys, in which are written 
down the details of London life for the ten years between 
1660 and 1670, shows a mental life much inferior to that 
of the existing England and America. 

Pepys was reared in a sickly air, but he had the sense, 
or the luck, to write down his encompassment of wicked 
littleness. To pass from that age to this day of Tyndall 
and Gladstone, Tennyson and all the scholars and states- 
men of Queen Victoria, is like passing from ' Dante's 
Inferno ' up the sweet hill to his ' Terrestrial Paradise. ' 
Coming to the modern England the reader feels like chant- 
ing the words of Dante: 

' A pleasant air 
That intermitted never, never veered, 
Smote on my temples like a wind 
Of softest influence, at which the boughs 

Waved trembling 

Upon their tops the feathered quiristers 
Applied their wonted art and with full joy 
Welcomed the morning hour and among the leaves 
Warbled their happy lays.' 

In this new breadth of thought all modern nations 
join, and not only is the old England left far behind, but 
even classic Athens and Rome are dimmed by this 
modern splendor. The new immense themes of reflection 

152 



'A THOUSAND HAPPY YEARS' 

have made a new mental power, and a greater mental 
republic. The state in its liberty and infinite detail of 
right, the church in its doctrines and morals, the social 
questions, the status of man, woman, and child, the home, 
the public education, the group of sciences, the brilliant 
company of arts, the inventions, the study of nature, the 
study of beauty, the drama, the opera, the literature of 
history, philosophy, poetry, and romance, are only the 
names of the tasks in which the mind of our age is busied. 
For breadth and depth no river of thought as great has 
ever flowed through any period. By the law of intelligence 
as related to sin, the stream of wrong must be less than it 
was before this greater thought came. Intemperance is 
moving slowly away from the upper classes. More be- 
nevolence comes. Love displaces cruelty. Sodom and 
Gomorrah are left to only history. Vice is not killed, but 
it is wounded. Moral beauty, and not infamy, is openly 
crowned. Our literature is more pure, and a little more 
of honor is seen on the streets, and is met by the traveler. 
As the sun, always pulling at our world, cannot affect the 
solid fields and mountains, but can lift up the wide sea 
because it is soft and flexible, and thus can make a tide 
rise high and run like the shadow of a cloud, so the human 
intellect rising to vast bulk and power can lift up the 
pliant morals of mankind, and make a wave of goodness 
run swift and high. Even in our land, which seems so 
sinful, the mass of thought is pulling up a tide of love. 
The golden age will dawn when the affections of society 
shall rise in a higher tide to the pulling of the intellect. 
O boasting century, question yourself thus: Do you 
fully believe in temperance ? Do you act out your belief ? 
Do you believe in kindness ? Do you act kindly ? Do you 
read and write poetry on the beauty of simplicity ? Do you 
declaim over the beauty of a life devoted to nature, to man, 
and to God ? Do you act out the philosophy of such sim- 
plicity ? Do you ask a friend to come and take a simple 
meal with you, and then do you and he sit down to a glut- 

153 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

ton's feast, and after three hours of excess rise with the 
body injured, and mind beclouded ? O boasting cen- 
tury, dost thou thus live ? If so, the golden age will not 
come. It will wait until thou shalt have detached thyself 
from all this injurious and comprehensive lie. But when 
thy moral nature shall become the companion of thy 
learning, then shall the flowers of paradise begin to bloom 
at thy feet, and her sky to grow rosy over thee. 

An effort is now being made by some orthodox clergy- 
men to make the church consist of persons who are trying 
to live a life like that of Christ. Doctrines are to sink, 
and character is to rise. It is as though the books on 
astronomy were to give place to the magnificence of the 
sun; it is as though the gifted mother were to put aside 
Cicero's essay on friendship and, instead of reading, put her 
arms around her idolized child ! Wonderful discovery, that 
a Christian ought to be like Christ ! From such a discovery 
we might infer that a musician ought to love music, and 
that a singer should love song! What a discovery! It 
follows that an orator should have language, and that a 
rainbow should love its seven arches and its seven colors. 

We all stand amazed that our era passed through 
eighteen centuries without happening upon those great 
inventions and discoveries that are now so useful and so 
grand; but we should be more deeply amazed at a Chris- 
tendom that could live through eighteen hundred years 
without having learned that Christianity is an imitation 
of Jesus! The Romanists and the Protestants cannot 
compel its morning to push back the curtains of night. 
Those great streaks of dawn will come when the human 
soul shall take up the Sermon on the Mount and trans- 
form it into life. Nature is a great believer in life. It 
transforms earth, air, water, and light into blossoms and 
buds and millions of living forms; it comes to the ideas of 
Jesus and flinging them into soul, commands them to 
live. It will not have any other result than life. 

The holy writers said these blessed years would be a 

154 



<A THOUSAND HAPPY YEARS' 

thousand, but we see the poetry of the specified number, 
and at once transform the period into a gigantic future of 
earth, and into an immortality beyond. 

Not by magic, not by earthquake, not by tempest or 
fire, will the thousand happy years come, but as education 
and goodness steal over man all his life, and neither his 
mind nor heart can feel or hear the footfall of those dear 
angels, thus the thousand happy years will come through 
God in his law, and come as silently as those violets which 
in the spring the earth sends up from her bosom. 



155 



THE HISTORICAL SCENE 

It is not probable the old sun-worshipers themselves 
carried in their minds such a sense of the unknowable and 
amazing as fills the modern cultivated heart when it thinks 
of that star whose light and heat have been radiating for 
millions of years in all directions; of which light one beam 
has gently smitten this planet without any intermission 
for ages upon ages, perhaps making it turn on its axis and 
fly onward in its orbit; surely making those primeval for- 
ests, which turned into strata of coal; making the rains, 
the soils, the vegetable, and animal kingdoms possible; 
making the rain clouds, and then dispelling them; send- 
ing his beams in at the windows of Abraham; shining on 
the pigeons of King David, making their wings to seem of 
silver, and their plumes to be of yellow gold (Psalm 68); 
making the mornings dawn richly upon the hills of Pericles 
and Plato, and the fields look sweetly for Zenobia and 
Sappho; making the Judean trees wave richly for John the 
Baptist, and the banks of the Jordan a perfect flower- 
garden for Christ. O thou, the sun! the sun! It is a 
blessed thing man does not appreciate thee to the utmost ! 
He would be broken-hearted over the thought of a night 
on which thou shouldst never rise! 

Among the impressive attributes of the mind, a prom- 
inent place must be given to its power to look back. 
Pascal was deeply affected by the thought that man could 
instantly project his attention to the sun and the stars. In 
an instant we can leave this busy scene, these streets which 
so swarm with people, and placing ourselves on a hilltop, 
can see the army of Xerxes starting on its march to invade 
Europe. We can see brass and gold flashing in a sun- 
beam that fell upon the fields nearly two thousand five 
hundred years ago. 

156 



THE HISTORICAL SCENE 

In order to count the hosts, Xerxes made an inclosure 
that would hold ten thousand troops. On the march his 
army filled and emptied this inclosure as they went, and 
thus, instead of counting his men, the great king meas- 
ured them, and found at last how many acres or square 
yards of humanity he had under his battle-flag. It is not 
difficult for us to see that wonderful picture of the proud 
king and his myriads. 

Out of this power of the mind to recall and review all 
the bygone ages, comes not only the happiness which a 
vast picture gallery can yield, but also the power to find 
truths and ideas in their origin, and the power to compare 
moral values with each other, and thus reach true measures 
of merit and demerit. 

It is never well to have the present so gay and so full as 
to admit of its excluding the long and rich yesterday. 
However full and attractive a year may be, it can never be 
equal to all past years. As all men are greater than any 
one man, so all years are greater than any one year. When 
we walked through the fields last July, and saw not only 
the products of the ground, but the attendant greatness 
of man, and recalled his liberty, his education, and his 
taste, his ambition, did we not feel that no greater time 
had ever dawned upon earth ? There was much of truth 
in the meditation, but there was, all the while, something 
much greater than that one exalted season. What was 
it ? It was the past in one totality. What was greater 
than last summer? All summers. Lofty as was the day 
that held you and me, greater by far is that past day that 
holds all our race. 

He will lose an intellectual fortune who shall permit 
the gay music of a festal evening to expel from his mind all 
those evenings that fell long ago upon the faces and hearts 
6f other generations. Man's power to look back and to 
live what is no longer in action, widens his life and makes 
him five not only amid the moments now passing, but 
among all the dead and gone millions of his race. 
157 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

All that we possess has come to us by way of a long 
path. There is no instantaneous liberty or wisdom or 
language or beauty Or religion. Architecture consumed 
much time in passing from the mud hut of the savage to 
the Gothic cathedral. Between the cave of the wild man 
and the columns and windows and perfect forms in 
modern buildings, the entire era of the Greeks inter- 
venes. 

If you select an impressive structure which has just 
received its finish from living hands, you must confess 
that it contains not only the rapid intellect of our age, but 
the slow thought of three thousand or four thousand 
years. All modern grand buildings are venerable in their 
antiquity. In a few months some busy men may make 
a Corinthian column out of wood and plaster, but the 
word 'Corinthian' betrays the workmen, and tells us 
how the great architect of Corinth set up such fluted pil- 
lars five hundred years before our Christ was born. 

Our Christian religion has come along such a lengthy 
path. There is no instantaneous architecture, so there 
is no suddenly made religion. As the vast modern struc- 
tures have come slowly, so our Christianity has arisen 
from humanity as the tree grows from the soil. 

No matter what estimates you may place upon Christ — 
whether you think Him divine or human — you see Him 
acting in harmony with the Creator of the world and con- 
forming to the law of a long path to each moral end. 
Christ might have alluded to coming steamships and 
coming telegraphs. He need not have gone out on the 
sea in a common fisherman's boat. He might have 
ordered a vessel like one of the palaces that now cross the 
Atlantic. But it would have been strange for heaven to 
send its Son to contradict the old genius of heaven, and 
thus order a house to be divided against itself. In what- 
ever form Christ came, His speech could not contain the 
word 'steamship,' or 'telegraph,' or 'Sunday school,' 
or ' woman's suffrage, ' because the first century was not 

158 



THE HISTORICAL SCENE 

permitted to live in the nineteenth. The path of human 
progress had to be long, and that fact had to modify the 
man of Nazareth. The God who made a world would 
not send His own Son to contradict all the genius of the 
terrestrial project. It was essential, therefore, that the 
language and conduct and gospel of Jesus should be 
pulled out of the human race, as we pull a bush or a tree 
out of its native soil. 

Nothing could help the modern Christian church more 
than a study of realism, and an application of the study 
to itself. Once imbued with realism, it would see that as 
the constitutions of the nations grew out of the deep wants 
of the people, the religion of Jesus came from the human 
race, and was not forced upon it from without. , Educa- 
tion is not an acquisition by miracle, but only a growth of 
latent powers, so Christianity was riot some opening of 
the brain for the purpose of inserting some new faculty. 
It was simply an uprising of the natural human soul. 

Take from the past any one small fragment and note 
how real and natural it is. Take the first man you meet 
in those old gospel times — Matthew. When we were 
children we met this man before we had ever seen Mark 
or Luke. We children were left to suppose that Matthew 
was a total stranger to Jesus, and that when Jesus said to 
him, ' Follow me, ' it came to the man like a stroke of light- 
ning. He felt that a god had called him, and that he must 
not hesitate a minute. He flung down his books as a tax- 
collector, and in a few minutes had become an itinerant 
clergyman. What was the surprise of us all afterward 
to learn Matthew was a relative of Jesus, had often been 
with him, and had long felt, no doubt, that by helping 
Jesus he could do great good work out in the world of 
morals and regeneration. 

This new realism does not harm the scene, but rather 

does it add beauty, for true beauty most abounds when 

art or literature paints the exact images of human life. 

The old artist always painted Peter as having royal robes 

159 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

on his body and great gold keys in liis hand for opening 
or shutting heaven, but such canvases have been empty 
of beauty, and when Peter shall return to art he will come 
as a plain man — impressive in his actuality. We may, 
indeed, paint Wisdom, or Virtue, or Diana, or Minerva as 
moving in royal purple, because these persons never were 
in real life. They belong to the realm of symbols and 
dream, but when you come to depict Washington or 
Caesar, we must become realists and must make the truth 
a thrilling part of the beauty. 

Matthew was a superior man in his time. The Greek 
language had brought the old Bible to his home, and the 
Roman empire had opened to all thinkers the gates of 
higher truth. As a tax-collector Matthew had met all 
kinds of persons, and he had seen also every form of 
wrong a heartless military despotism could impose upon 
a helpless people. He had seen the last comfort of home 
taken from the family; he had seen the bread taken from 
the mouths of the children. He had seen the life of a 
human being made as cheap as the life of a brute. Some 
months or weeks before this call he had been selected as 
one of the twelve, and must have been contemplating a 
public service among the people and along with his great 
.Master. 

The earliest Christian historian states that Matthew 
was a member of the Essenes sect, and, living a temperate 
life, was only a common student of those things in which 
his Master was a chief. The meeting of the two in his- 
tory came from their union in daily life. The selecting 
of Matthew was much like the meeting of Washington 
and La Fayette, but with this difference, the New Testa- 
ment persons belonged to one state and one family. The 
tears which Christ shed over Jerusalem had dimmed 
other eyes also, and when he said ' Do to others what you 
would have others do to you,' thousands must have 
thanked him for expressing so well their cherished senti- 
ments. The crimes and cruelties of late centuries had 

160 



THE HISTORICAL SCENE 

made all moral philosophy ask, 'How would you love 
to be treated in that way?' 

Living in this age we can have little conception of the 
wrongs which then desolated the world. These cul- 
minated in Rome in those days when it was dangerous 
for a man to be known as honest. The kings and usurpers 
had no use for honest citizens. Unhappy land when a 
man had to conceal his integrity or die! Tacitus says 
Nero had one virtue, he did not love to look at the agonies 
of his victim; but Domitian loved 'to be a witness of 
human agony. ' When he found a philosopher or a poet 
he at once exiled him. This was just after the day of 
the disciples, but the murder of such men as Cicero re- 
calls a period when the blood of the honorable was taken 
as the penalty of their goodness. 

By looking into recent times we can see a group of men 
and women rising out of some great distress of their age. 
Pronounce the names of Wilberforce, Lovejoy, Theodore 
Parker, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Whittier, 
Beecher, Stowe, and you at once see a group that was 
called together by a public calamity. There lay not far 
away eight millions in chains. 

Led by a public sorrow more widespread and deeper, 
the disciples were detached from the crowd. With Jesus 
for a central inspiration Matthew resigned his office, Mark 
was a clerk or a companion of Peter, Luke abandoned his 
practice of medicine, John left the fish-nets to be dragged 
by other hands, and joining with others they began to 
move against the moral misfortunes of society. Before 
Christ came these men had all been carrying in their 
hearts the people's grief. At the coming of the new 
leader opinion arose in majesty and pity burst into tears. 

Five thousand followed Christ up into the mountains 
because they knew He would be a language to their dumb 
lips. They felt that He would say what they were longing 
to hear. When word by word the mountain speech fell 
into their hearts, many of them must have cried for joy 

161 



TRUTH S LEAF BY LEAF 

that they could hear such music falling as from heaven 
upon their spirits. The moral scene was as realistic as 
the hillside where the speaker stood. Dismiss from 
thought the church, your church or that of your neighbor, 
and look at the picture as it must, indeed, have been. 

The fame of Jesus had become as great as that recent 
fame of Wesley or Whitfield. Persons were making long 
journeys to reach the town the Nazarene was making 
famous. The sunshine which fell then was that which 
falls now. Some of the crowds are laughing, some are 
chatting, the little children are playing by the roadside. 
The roller-birds are numerous overhead, the magpie chat- 
ters in the shrubs, the rabbit or cony is startled from the 
heaps of rocks, the farmer in the field looks on, wondering 
whether to work at his task or to leave the growing grain 
and join the multitude. 

As the scene lay wholly within the bounds of nature, 
so the doctrines kept company with the sunshine and the 
roller-birds, and sprang up out of man's actual life. When 
that throng came back to their homes they had heard that 
the pure in heart would be blessed, and that those who 
hunger for righteousness would sit down at the greatest 
feast ever spread; that love must be so sweeping that it 
must touch even an enemy just as the sunbeams do not 
fall upon only foreheads that are just. As the benev- 
olence of the sun is irresistible, as it will make a thorn 
tree put forth leaves and a bramble blossom, so man's 
love was to fall upon an enemy and change his soul's 
winter into summer time. If a bramble must live it 
would better blossom, if an enemy must exist he would 
better be encompassed by friendship. 

Out of the travels and labors of Jesus and his disciples 
there arose slowly an ethics, the most lofty, and a peace, 
the most sweet. Before him society raged like wild 
beasts ; after him it took refuge in virtue and hope. Virtue 
adorned this world; hope crowned the future. 

But the children of Jesus were few compared with the 

162 



THE HISTORICAL SCENE 

children of the bloody past. Even such grand men as 
Pliny the Younger and Tacitus could not enjoy the teach- 
ings of Nazareth. One by one the men who were toiling 
to cover the earth with love and peace dropped into bloody 
graves. Of all the group that set forth around the divine 
Master, Matthew is said to be the only one who escaped 
the old refuge of kings' — the death of the virtuous. Thrones 
founded upon crime find in human goodness only their 
ruin. In a despotism all noble men must be slain. 

Christianity sprang up out of a reason deeply enlight- 
ened. The world had never seen such powerful logic 
and such breadth of thought as were reached by the 
Greeks and Romans. Some of those books of old Athens 
and Rome read as though they had been written by John 
Stewart Mill or by Emilio Castelar. Pliny the Younger 
was much like our William Wirt, and Cicero and Charles 
Sumner were twin brothers in culture and logic. In that 
brilliant period there arose the gospel of Jesus. As 
Angelo carved his statues out of his country's marble, so 
the gospel was carved out of the adjoining life. Poverty 
must end; wrong and sin must die; the righteous life 
must be lived ; love must color all the days of this world ; 
and perfect hope must plant flowers on every grave. 

Reason has been defined as the discovery of a good 
path to a good end. Out of such reason came America, 
a good way to reach liberty. Christianity is a group of 
noble paths to noble ends. As the highways in a nation 
lead the traveler to some metropolis, as the smooth roads 
in the great parks lead to more and more of beauty, thus 
the paths of religion lead each mortal along toward a 
more blessed destiny. As he walks his penitential tears 
turn into tears of joy as they fall. Sin abandons him. 
Love of man and God turns winter into summer, and 
makes even black clouds roseate. Faith makes night as 
rich as day, and while these paths wind along through a 
beauty of their own, they all reach out toward heaven and 
meet at its sapphire gate. 

163 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

It took a powerful reason to discover these great paths 
to great ends, and now it will be the task of a similar 
reason to reopen these highways for more millions of the 
living and dying pilgrims of earth. 

Blessed vision — that of reason coming back to society! 
In the uprising of reason lies our hope. It will purify 
the public religion. It will bring the true Christ and the 
true church. It will redouble virtue and happiness. It 
will replace upon the forehead of Christ the lost crown of 
wisdom and love. It will re-open all the great paths to 
great ends, and will lead the people along a way that has 
happiness to a grave that has hope. 



164 



A SIMPLER AND GREATER RELIGION 

In the material pursuits of man it is often necessary to 
have complex machines, the demand being imperative, 
but in his spiritual kingdom there is no such inexorable 
demand. There is no more demand for a complex reli- 
gion than there was for the literary style of the poet Brown- 
ing. It would have been quite an increase to fame and 
fortune to that talented man had he possessed a style as 
clear as that of Shakespeare or Lord Byron. He had 
noble purposes and great power, but his words always 
became entangled, like a skein of fine silk. His thoughts 
were indeed silk, but it is difficult to pull quickly out of the 
tangle a long needleful of good thread. The greatest of 
all thoughts can be best expressed by the utmost simpli- 
city, because the idea, like a mountain, must stand forth 
all alone, that it may be the better seen. When a moun- 
tain is mingled with a long group, and is modified by foot- 
hills which reach away in all directions for a half hundred 
miles, there is the most sublime Alp or Apennine injured 
by a complexity. Christianity is much like an author or 
a piece of art, it can rise up in its own grandeur and ex- 
press its divineness, or it can be almost hidden and ruined 
by surroundings in which there are no traces of greatness. 

When Pascal lived and created such a sensation in the 
Romish church of the seventeenth century, his power lay 
in his ability to raise a laugh over the obscure, metaphys- 
ical inquiries so dear of that period. Born a geometer and 
a mathematician, his reason could strip all ideas of their 
false side, and could detect instantly a piece of bad logic. 
He loved to ridicule the absurdities of the Middle Ages and 
to plead for the simple gospel of the first four centuries. 
His influence came chiefly from the power to lift up a great 
idea until, by its altitude, it made all other ideas contemp- 
165 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

tible. He turned the morals of the Jesuits into contempt, 
and the name of God into sublimity. 

The most intricate and senseless of all philosophies are 
those of the earliest and most ignorant races. The reli- 
gions of India are unreadable in our age. 

One of the last lessons learned by mankind is this : that 
simplicity may be power, that it is nearly always the most 
powerful element in thought and art. No modern mind 
could find the courage to work its way through such won- 
derful admixtures of fact and invention. Many of the 
absurd inquiries which attracted the schoolmen and held 
them captive up to the sixteenth century, came into Chris- 
tianity from the old East. Nearly all of those questions 
about the size of the spirit, about its ability to travel fast 
from star to star, its ability to dance on a needle's point, 
came into the Christian period from the heathen world, 
which had flourished long before the birth of Christ. So 
rich was the Hindoo philosophy at last that it would have 
filled volumes had the conglomeration ever been fully ex- 
pressed in writing. 

Fondness for entanglement, we see in its better days, 
in the Apocalypse of Saint John. There is no doubt John 
was one of the most beautiful characters of all who have 
lived, but this moral beauty did not save him from being 
led away by the prevailing charm of excessive figure and 
of wide labyrinths of thought. 

Should any one, curious over the past and fond of com- 
parisons, wish to compare the Jesus and the disciple he 
loved, he will find much of the difference contained in the 
mental simplicity of the Master. With Jesus the greater 
the truth, the simpler its expression. As his ideas grew 
in vastness, they diminished in number. Our earth has 
many little lakes, but only a few oceans, because there is 
no room for many; so Christ offered only a few truths, be- 
cause each truth had to be thousands of miles in length 
and breadth. What Christ said is as clear, as rich, as 
divine, to-day as it was eighteen hundred years ago. We 

166 



GREATER RELIGION 



see in these two faces the Master and the gentle disciple. 
John was all the more beloved because he was only the 
companion planet of the flaming Sun. The central Sun 
did not need help, it needed only a companion in the realms 
of space. St. John was this companion, and Christ and 
he will journey onward forever, hand in hand, the greater 
and the less. 

There used to be recognized several kinds of faith. 
There was a faith in miracles, a faith in the divinity of 
Christ, a faith which even devils might cherish, and last, 
and best of all, came a saving faith. This kind would 
come only by the intervention of miraculous power. 
What kind of faith an inquiring soul might have found, or 
might find, was exceedingly uncertain. The soul might 
be mistaken and be like the men who, in digging a well on 
their farms, have come upon iron pyrites, and have held a 
feast, and invited all the neighbors to rejoice with them 
over the discovery of a fabulous vein of gold. It is within 
living memory that many a young person has longed to 
have a saving faith, but has been uncertain whether what 
he had was the purest of gold or only the cheap sulphide 
of iron. All these shadings of faith have melted into one — 
a faith in Jesus Christ as man's beloved friend. If we had 
asked the poet Cowper whether he had faith in his mother, 
and whether it was a faith in miracles or in testimony, he 
would have scorned all our theological chemistry, and have 
said, T shall love my mother forever.' Behold in Cowper's 
reply the coming simplicity of Christianity! It will rear 
at last a sentiment which will make earth beautiful and 
heaven near. 

We all perceive that the millions of people need a great, 
deep friendship with the Man of Galilee, who held in His 
soul all that is great in human practice or belief. Having 
had eighteen centuries of analysis of religion, how ready 
the world is for a taste of the good analyzed so long. 
Newman and Fenelon possessed it; so Calvin and John 
Knox carried it in their hearts ; Paul and Apollos were full 

167 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

of it when the world was young; it sprang up in the soul 
of John Wesley and came to Whitefield; it inflamed the 
bosom of Mme. Guyon, and away it went to live with the 
missionaries who traversed these snows in winters long 
since melted into summers which also are gone. If 
minds so scattered through two thousand years met in 
one Christianity, then there must be a religion which lies 
apart from the hundreds of doctrines, and which cares 
for none of them, any more than the sea cares for the 
artists who sit on the sand and attempt to paint its picture. 
We can imagine the ocean saying to the artist : ' Are you 
trying to make a picture of me? Me? Why, I am ten 
thousand miles wide, and am not even in your sight! 
Paint me! Why, I am not here for you to paint. I am 
washing the snores of England, America, Spain, and 
France. ' 

We can imagine Christianity saying : ' What ! are you 
delineating me? How can you paint me when I am not 
in Geneva alone ? I was with Magdalen when she prayed; 
I was with the Joseph who asked to furnish the tomb for 
my crucified Christ; I was with the mother of Augustine 
more years than I was with Augustine himself; I was with 
all little children which Christ held in His arms; I was 
with John when he was preaching in the wilderness; I 
was with the five thousand once, and gave them all the 
bread of two worlds; I was with the disciples when they 
sung a hymn, and I was with all the martyrs when they 
died. Oh, thou canst not express me in articles, for I 
am measureless! I am not a science of plants — not a 
botany. I am the blossoms themselves — the color and 
the perfume!' 

The Christian religion often seems like that vast struc- 
ture in Rome to which many architects carried their deep- 
est and most serious genius. Bramante came first. He 
died, and the great Raphael took his place among the 
arches and columns. The grave soon called Raphael. 
Then came Peruzzi to stay by the stones for a half of a 
lifetime. Angelo then came and gave the great sanctuary 

168 



GREATER RELIGION 



twenty-two of his precious circles of the sun. Genius 
followed genius for one hundred and twenty years. 

In that long procession of Italian summer times these 
great architects hated each other and quarreled, each 
with his neighbor. Castelar says that Bramante and 
Angelo, separated by the thing of earth, are now united 
in immortality. While the builders were often enemies, 
the temple grew in its grandeur, because its arches and 
columns and dome could take no part in the quarrels of 
daily human life. The great basilica arose each year 
toward the sky, and each year left the further below, 
down among the marble chips, the many quarrels of the 
workman. It absorbed from the architects their love and 
their genius, and left all else behind. Christianity can 
make use of the hearts and powers of genius, but it re- 
mands back to oblivion all the discords of fretful minds. 
It can extract something from a Cardinal Newman, some- 
thing from John Wesley, something from each cathedral 
and each little chapel in town or field, but in its vast life 
which is to follow the human race forever it will work its 
way up toward its God, long after we shall have gone 
away from among the useless chips around the base. It 
will rise a single shaft, sublime but simple. 

Ah, what a high, pure, and religious art is architecture ! 
It cannot express an impure or wicked thought. Its ideas 
and emotions are those of power, grace, harmony, long 
endurance, protection, and all beauty. All its creations 
springing upward from the foundations lift the heart up 
with them; and when the columns at last are crowned, the 
looker-on seems himself crowned with virtue. No wonder 
that religion early made architecture its near friend and 
companion, for this art separates itself from sin, and in 
its mighty uplifting resembles all of faith's holiest dreams. 
Its suggests the infinite of both God and man. In its 
presence all that is small in us disappears, and the high 
and low, the rich and poor, compose one brotherhood. 
All high art creates for the lower a high moral. 

The great end of man is not only to see beauty, but 
1G9 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

after having seen it, to live it. Memory and history are 
often the endless life of a valuable reality. Nearly all the 
great men of the world are in their graves. We have not 
seen them nor heard them. But, once here, always here. 
Homer and Dante do not go away. The harp of Sappho 
is still sounding. The tears of Christ are still falling. As 
the sea rolls and murmurs in the night, and is sublime 
even in its shadows, so each great event dying in the 
material fact is caught up by memory and history, and 
lives on grandly in their perpetual shadow. Athens is 
still with us, for time has only enveloped it in a silvery 
mist. No book you have read and loved can ever pass 
away. The colors you found in it will never fade. Once 
with you it is yours always. 

Christ was so essentially a life that His religion must 
follow closely the plan of its Founder. There are many 
intellectual inquiries upon which the church does not 
what was or would have been the Nazarene's opinion, 
but the life of Christ admits of no doubt. The demand 
of the whole earth is expressed in the few words — a life 
like that of Jesus. With such a piety before man and 
in man, his present and his eternity will be one wide field 
of blessedness. 

It must be remembered that a simple Christianity does 
not mean an unadorned religion. Mont Blanc is simple, 
but it is wondrously adorned. Coleridge saw it rising 
majestically 'forth from a sea of pines'; he saw on its 
sides, 'motionless torrents' and 'silent cataracts'; he saw 
'flowers skirting the edge of eternal frost'; he heard there 
' a thousand voices praising God. ' Rising up thus, in all 
the matchless beauty which eternal winter could heap 
upon its summit, and which eternal spring could weave 
around its base, yet is that gigantic pile impressive in its 
central simplicity. It holds no enigmas. It appeals to 
all the human family, and speaks in a language all minds 
can interpret. So, by a simple Christianity one must not 
mean a desert. Around a simple creed may be grouped 
the rich details so much loved by the human heart. 

170 



THE EDUCATION OF THE HEART. 

As the word 'man' includes all human beings of all 
ages and conditions and colors, so there is, or should be, 
some word which stands, or might stand, for many emo- 
tions of the heart. When Christ pointed out to the young 
man the one defect of his nature, that he would not give 
his property to the poor, He must have taught some les- 
son more general than simply that money must pass from 
the rich to the humble. 

The teacher of the lesson had Himself given no money 
to the poor, for He had none to give, but He had bestowed 
upon the people more, and richer gifts, than could ever 
have come to them through the estate of a Csesar. Mas- 
ter and pupil combine to assure us that there is some 
other term than charity, more beautiful than the distribu- 
tion of gold. It is more comprehensive. It cannot be 
a general living and acting for humanity, for if we were 
each alone in some Selkirk island, and there was no such 
thing as humanity, we should still need this one virtue. It 
is greater than common benevolence, because benevolence 
is only one of its parts. 

There is no word for it, no phrase for it. The great 
rich man who left the earth recently did not seem to have 
any traces of this general, but unnamed, virtue. The 
eighty millions did not turn into any form of spiritual joy, 
they did not make life more rich or more blessed. They 
lay like that California gold, which for hundreds of years 
was stored away in the hills and ravines. Gold with this 
man was like gold in the quartz rocks. It was not living, 
loving gold, but gold imbedded in flint. 

A few years ago a man was fined in New England for 
nailing up on his wall on Sunday a vining rose which a 
storm had beaten down on Saturday night. An old 

171 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

'Blue Law' was found unrepealed, and the man was 
fined. So the story came west. In real justice the citizen 
ought of course to be rewarded, for there is something 
good in a man when he can pity such a torn and shat- 
tered vine. He could not give money to the plant; he 
could not preach to it; he could not cheer it with pity; he 
obeyed his spiritual nature and fastened it all up neatly 
and kindly, all on the Sabbath day. What shall we call 
such a feeling ? There is no name for it. Our language 
was started by savages and no term has yet come to ex- 
press the relations of civilization to a Sunday for man 
and a Sunday for a rose-bush. Meanwhile all human 
life suffers because the best meaning of its terms have 
not yet appeared. 

The ideal man when he comes and the ideal woman 
when she comes will be sensitive toward the entire scene 
which surrounds them. A great advance will be made 
over the sentiment of Terence: 'Homo sum; humani 
nihil a me aliem um puto. ' ' I am a human being and 
cannot, therefore, be indifferent to any of the interests 
of mankind. ' This is one of the noblest sentiments, but it 
is now seen as not as large, not as beautiful as the human 
ideal, for it does not include sympathy with the brute 
kingdom. Wonderful age when great men shall pay a 
type-writer for composing letters of wisdom and friend- 
ship, and will act in direct person only in the killing and 
wounding of golden pheasants and brilliant ducks. It is 
singular that the statesmen who can hire a secretary to 
compose their private letters cannot hire a common 
executioner to kill their game. 

We evidently ought to enlarge on the maxim of the 
Roman, and instead of saying 'I am human, and all 
human interests are dear to me, ' we should say ' I am a 
soul in a great world, and the world shall be my heart's 
love. I will carry water to a thirsty tree; I will tie up 
the fallen vines. I will, indeed, love man most because 
he is greatest in my world, but when man is absent or 

172 



EDUCATION OF THE HEART 

blest, still will I pour out good will upon all the beautiful 
surroundings of man's life.' Until we can live up to such 
a broad sentiment, we shall pass our days in only the 
dawn of human merit and human enjoyment. 

It would, indeed, be wholly impossible to prove that 
man can confer any happiness upon a thirsty tree or a 
fallen vine, but it would not be difficult to prove that man 
must be a soul full of sympathy, and must make all things 
feel the pressure of his extreme culture. When one of 
Virgil's oxen fell dead in the furrow, the poet pitied the 
one that fell, and also the one left standing alone. It had 
lost its companion at the work and in the leisure of the 
farm. It is quite probable the sentiments were beyond 
the intelligence of the faithful brutes, but it was grand in 
Virgil thus to be in full accord with his world, and to 
make up of its tree life or flower life or brute life an elegant 
language whispered to his own spirit. 

Had he not been capable of holding some picture in 
that scene he would never have written a poem that has 
been read constantly by the cultivated races for ten thou- 
sand years. If the dying ox did not need Virgil, he needed 
the dying ox. The poet was to live with men and even 
write for men. He was also to live in and for himself. 
It was necessary for him to have a soul which was in 
sympathy with the marvelous scenery of three score and 
ten years. Death is so strange that it is wonderful that 
an educated man can take pleasure in the death of a 
bird. 

One of the best of all words is the term 'sympathy'; 
the Greeks and Latins used it, and then sent it on to us. 
They enjoyed the perfume of the flower and then sent 
us the root for our garden. Sympathy implies a resem- 
blance of emotion and object, or of heart to heart. The 
little children seen in the New Testament as 'playing 
funeral ' and playing ' wedding ' complained that when 
they mourned their playmates would not groan and act 
like mourners; and, then, when they played 'dancing' 

173 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

and piped gay music their fellows would not dance. 
Had the little group of children been in sympathy, when 
one mourned all would have come to lament, and when 
the leader began to dance all would have joined in the 
gay movement. 

Thus the larger world of the older children asked for 
the presence of sympathy. It must be with man, and go 
with him, and be like his eyesight, or his hearing, or his 
heart-beats — a part of himself. There can be no limit 
to its task. It is omnipresent, it is endless. When it 
sees the flower open it must wish there be no worm in the 
blood ; when it sees the ship on the sea it may breathe that 
prayer for a safe voyage. When it sees the ripening 
wheat it must ask the skies to remain fair, and the hail- 
stones not to pound the tender stalks; when it sees the 
bride at the altar it must pause to offer a prayer that her 
life may equal all her charms and dreams. This is the 
sumpathcia of all the great classic times and of all the 
modern years, so far as they, too, are great. The flying 
bird, the running deer, the falling vine, the broken leaf, 
the barefoot boy, must have our sympathy. When the 
world weeps we must weep; when it pipes gay music we 
must dance. 

It is probable that the extent and equality of education 
may be learned by measuring a man's sympathies. The 
more universal and powerful they are, the more complete 
his education. If he is in full accord with music, but 
hates his family, and is mean toward man and brute being, 
he is only a trained animal — a poor creature capable of 
performing but one trick. You have seen a dog that could 
churn, but it could not knit or spin. Rousseau was one of 
these specialists in sympathy. He could weep in pres- 
ence of some form of beauty and pathos. He wrote 
philosophy with a gifted pen, but he had his five children 
sent, at the birth of each to a foundlings' home, because 
such a great philosopher should not pay any regard to his 
children. He was a man with only one or two emotions. 

174 



EDUCATION OF THE HEART 

What our age wants is not a new power of reasoning; 
it wants to have young men by the million, and young 
women by the million, who will select their premises from 
the realms of all noble action, and will argue their way 
toward an infinite kindness and goodness. 

We need no more logical nobility, we need that noble- 
ness of soul which can live amid life's beautiful causes to 
their beautiful results. The greatest defect in our schools 
would seem to be, that they confer ability without giving 
noble inspiration. A great painter may employ his high 
art for low ends. The man who painted 'The Angelus' 
might have drawn as well a horse-race in which some 
noble animal was being urged to pain and death by elec- 
tric spurs; or he might have painted a dog fight for some 
brute of fallen men; but his soul chose that scene called 
' The Angelus, ' and the high art and the high theme met 
and mingled like that angel which John saw mingling 
with the corona of the sun. Why should St. John's seraph 
stand with foot in the dust and sins of earth ? He knew 
well what would be the home of that glorified messenger. 
Thus the divine genius to paint images must deal only 
in great images, that the artist and the canvas may not 
be in the mire of earth. It was lifted up to the border of 
supreme life. Our public education makes logicians, 
but they do not reason amid premises rich enough, to 
ends grand enough. 

All literature is one and the same tiling, namely: The 
utterance of the human heart. Let its name be Greek, 
or German, or English, it abounds in religion, pathos, 
sympathy, loving kindness. It always has been and 
always will be the portrait of man's inmost feeling. 
Those studies were not great because they were Latin and 
Greek, but because they were literature; that most divine 
throbbing of the noblest hearts. The modem student 
should travel through and through it until he shall have 
become as sensitive as the noblest ideals who adorn its 
pages. Literature proper is the gallery of spiritual ideals. 

175 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

There we meet Antigone and Hypatia and Evangeline; 
there we meet all the Greek faces winch have ever stood 
before the soul of genius ; and there we meet such blessed 
realities as Christ himself. It is that sacred mountain 
top upon which humanity becomes transfigured and 
passes a few hours in shining garments for the body, and 
in rapture for the soul. Man should expand those hours 
into days and the days into life. He must smile and cry 
when he comes into the world, and smile and cry when 
he goes out. 

Education must not teach logic only and strengthen 
memory, and make the mind a storehouse of knowledge, 
but it must remember that one thing we lack — the power 
to love the world. Every educated being can give his 
heart to the world and can say to the earth, thou hast 
been kind to me. I wish to thank the trees and the blos- 
soms, the seasons, for being here when I came, and for 
staying so long. If you cannot seem to sell and give to 
the poor, since you may have naught to sell, you can lend 
the world your sympathy, you can pour out upon it your 
poetry, you can speak to it in art and science, you can carry 
a soul full of joy or pathos, you can smite its virtues and 
fasten up to the wall its fallen virtues in some way, and in 
all ways the heart must get out of its prison. All the 
friendship which educated men and women express to- 
ward the world to-day will be changed into the happiness 
of to-morrow. All this sympathy with man, and bird, 
and beast, all this sensibility, this delicate justice, this 
pathos, this gratitude, will be found in the civilization of 
the morrow when it comes to gather up its jewels. 



176 



THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 

The advance of the intellect must imply an advance 
of the affections. A greater thought must imply a greater 
feeling. As rapidly as the intellect progresses in the study 
of man, so rapidly must the feeling of philanthropy deepen. 
As it takes more water to encompass the larger island, 
so it requires more of love and sympathy to surround the 
bulk of modern knowledge. When the statesmen knew 
but little, they could live in more of indifference. To the 
densely ignorant sleep is deep. To the highly intellec- 
tual sleep never returns with a childhood sweetness; the 
learning in the intellect empties too much solicitude into 
the heart. 

By learning one must not imply the contents of all the 
great books ; one must mean only an acquaintance with the 
vast scene that surrounds man. When we permit great 
scholars to speak, we are informed that Tennyson was not 
a learned man, and that Whittier's mental storehouse was 
even less heavy laden with facts. While these college- 
bred critics are speaking of one thing, the world is speak- 
ing of another, and knows well that those two minds were 
deeply informed as to man and the earth. There is an 
information which belongs to a whole, not the college 
education of an individual, but the intelligence of the 
majority. This widespread learning has become, at last, 
so influential that it has created what may be called a 
higher sentiment. 

It is difficult to define the term ' higher sentiment. ' 
The soul does not submit very willingly to analysis. It 
is, indeed, a notion that after dark man may throw upon 
it all the light he may command, but it absorbs all these 
rays and remains in its old heavy shadow. This is all 
we know : that after one age has been kind to a few men, 

177 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

along will come a time which will offer that kindness to 
all ; after an age has been partial to some shape of beauty, 
along will come an epoch to which a thousand forms of 
beauty will be precious, The Etrurians must have es- 
teemed highly the beauty of vases. It is almost certain 
that literature and poetry lay dormant, waiting for the 
elegant earthenware to have its day. With what delight 
did the men and women of that time gaze upon all that 
came from the hand of the potter. Older than the Roman 
people, and perhaps than the Greek, it was a limited form 
of decoration. It is easy to say that beauty around 
Raffaelle was a higher sentiment. It is probable Josiah 
Wedgwood's porcelain works at Staffordshire would 
have amazed all Etruria, could that man in his creations 
have suddenly entered old Italy when its pottery was at 
its best. If after seeing the English products, the Etrus- 
cans possessed any remnant of national vanity, a vision 
of Dresden china would have left them, like Sheba's 
queen, with their 'spirit all gone out of them.' The 
Dresden porcelain are only a small fragment of our age. 
The public taste is too great to be gratified by only one 
form of physical charm. Sentiments grow in order to 
express all the advancing stages of intellectual treasure. 

What is thus true in the department of plastic art is 
true in the field of religion. With the increase of learning 
the religious sentiment rises in dignity and scope. The 
sentiment is one and the same, but this spirit branches out 
so as to include more details. Our religion is much like 
that of the sixteenth century, but it is also much unlike 
that old piety. The sentiment has become more delicate. 
What was music once is not half sweet enough now. The 
soul of the moderns asks for sound much more sublime 
or pathetic. 

It is one of the most attractive qualities of our age that 

it begins to attach some value to sentiments. It would 

rather a man would act and feel like a Christian than 

believe like one. It asks us to know what the right is, 

178 



THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 

but away from ethics its cares little for intellectual details. 
Immersion and sprinkling are both one to it. The senti- 
ment of religion has passed upward in the last half cen- 
tury. A large variety of creeds should remain, because 
it is so essential that there be many refuges for many minds, 
but there need be only one refuge for the heart. Piety 
is not easily divided up into parts. Seen in Bossuet, or 
Pascal, or Wesley, or William Penn, it is only one senti- 
ment. It remains for our age to see it in all this old-time 
unity. It will grow more powerful when society shall 
trust their souls to it and realize that it is their happiness 
and salvation. Against the old dominance of particular 
and immaterial ideas, comes now the new empire of a 
spiritualized Christianity. There are individuals yet to 
be reclaimed, but as for the age, it has ceased to estimate 
a bishop by his ideas about apostolic succession or by his 
friendship for men not of his fold. The Christian life of 
the bishop is the only spectacle the world wishes to see. 

This new exaltation of sentiment dooms to obscurity 
a wonderful collection of minute ideas. In man's wor- 
ship of God lies the unity of religion, in the intellectual 
workings of the mind an endless variety. The soul must 
be permitted to love most what is most in harmony with 
itself. 

As the poet passes along over the material world and 
the human world, picking out all that is most in harmony 
with the poet in heart, pausing in the vale of Chamouni 
as Coleridge paused, or on 'The Bridge,' of Midnight, 
or with the 'Cotter' on 'Saturday Night,' or with the 
yew trees in the churchyard, thus the Christian to-day 
passes along in the company of only the doctrines which 
appeal to his spiritual nature. The Christian orthodoxy 
of the future will all stand or fall with the rising or falling 
of its love for Jesus, and its mingled faith, obedience, 
and adoration. 

Whittier's early faith excluded hymns and songs; his 
last days admitted them. At his funeral sweet songs were 
179 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

sung under the trees, and all forms of thinkers spoke, be- 
cause the eighty-five years of free thought had made the 
feeling of the Christian detach itself from a dogma about 
hymns and instruments of music. The religious spirit 
is fitted for either accident of the hour — music or silence. 
As the body of Whittier was carried out into a garden to 
receive its funeral honors — carried out because the house 
was small and the garden large, and because Christianity 
cannot distinguish a garden from a house — so the religion 
of the Christian has risen far above nearly all its old 
dogmas, and will always find its orthodoxy in man's love 
for God, and in his assemblage of virtues. The church 
goes out under the trees. 

In Ernest Renan there was a deep sense of a spiritual 
world ; Renan mourned because he could not find his God. 
There was no mockery, no boasting laughter over a deity 
that could number hairs or count sparrows. When dark 
doubts came to Renan his literature was not full of laugh- 
ter, but of tears. He said: 'Oh God of my youth, I 
have longed to return to thee in triumph and in the pride 
of reason. Once thou didst listen to me. Having heard 
thy voice, I hoped to see thy face. 

And now I have seen thy temple crumble stone by stone, 
the sanctuary has no longer an echo, and instead of an 
altar ornamented with lights and flowers, I have seen rise 
before me an altar of brass, against which prayer — severe, 
unadorned, without images, and blood stained by fatality 
— shatters itself. I would beat my breast could I hope 
to hear again that beloved voice which once so impressed 
me. ' 

The Greek statues were statues of the gods. Apollo, 
Minerva, Zeus, came from the religious feelings of man- 
kind. Nearly all the impressive architecture of earth 
climbed up out of the soul of religion. Under the banner 
of faith, all the artists around Angelo painted and carved 
and built. When a recent canvas charmed the whole 
public its subject was 'Christ Before Pilate,' and when 
180 



THE RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 

another canvas brought in the market a hundred thousand 
dollars it was the picture of two mortals in the field bow- 
ing their heads because the distant church bell was sound- 
ing all through their hearts the solemn beauty of religion. 
It must have required great emptiness of soul to paint the 
ills which might result should Christianity see the assem- 
bled beauty of a world's fair. Christianity has seen all 
that beauty, not only has it seen beauty, but it has thought 
it all out and has spent life in expressing it. Compared 
with religion atheism has been a flowerless, leafless tree. 
Religion has been the kind of sentiment most liable to 
grow a luxuriant harvest of the great in art. 

We cannot define this spirit. It is like the spirit itself, 
and in a force which rules and shapes and colors every- 
thing. When Virgil's hero was in heaven he asked his 
pagan but sainted father, what the spirit of man might 
be. The old hero said it was something which fed and 
inspired all else. ' Spiritus intus alit; totamque injusa 
per artus mens agitat molen, et magno se cor pore miscet.' 
' It is a mind which infuses itself through the whole mass 
and quickens all and seems dissolved in the particles of 
the whole body. ' 

When we look into the highest type of the modern 
human face, the ideal and actual man or woman, and 
compare it with those faces which belong to the savage 
races, we at once see a new form and expression and power 
over all the continents. This result is not the outcome of 
a college course; it does not tell us that the ideal man 
is a chemist, or that that ideal woman can write history 
or poetry. These faces tell us only that this manhood 
and womanhood are carrying the soul of the great 
image. It looks out of the window of the eye, it throws 
out the hand, it keeps time to every heart-beat. 

If one would view Christianity in a manner most im- 
pressive and in a logic the most unassailable, one would 
best pass by a myriad of intellectual accidents and note 
that spirit which, from the Deity and from Bethlehem, 

181 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

moves out into the great arena of man, and which in our 
century moves, colors, cheers, recreates, and inspires 
wonderful spirit. It can find a fine art ; it can make men 
become brothers; it can make the mind beautiful; it can 
make the heart virtuous; it can paint all of time in rich 
colors and make the soul seem too great to die. 



182 



THE REALITIES OF RELIGION 

'Oh, dreadful day! Oh, day of wonder, 
When the earth shall burst asunder, 
Wrapped in awful flame and thunder. ' 

When this 'Dies Irae' was written was there no one 
to write the day of joy? What an omission! It is as 
though Columbus had sailed north and had discovered 
only eternal ice and had never dreamed of a hemisphere 
rich in the untold luxuriance of the tropics. The " Days 
of Wrath' are indeed attending humanity, but so are 
the days of grace. The court of God is always in ses- 
sion. The Supreme Judge is always on His throne; but 
the thunder that issues from His chamber toward the 
ungodly must never drown the diviner, sweeter music 
that rolls outwardly toward all the purer forms of human 
life. To that music our children all walk and run and 
play. In God's grace the toiler works and sleeps. 

It would seem that the vast realities of the Christian 
religion are a God and a Son of God, Jesus; then man 
made with a nature that may rise or sink; then a judg- 
ment day mingling with all these passing years wrapping 
some hearts in the cloud of anger, bathing other hearts 
in a flood of heaven's approved foretastes of an everlast- 
ing sunshine — a judgment day drifting slowly along 
toward immortality within whose immense borders other 
urns of grief or happiness will be overturned upon those 
who may have crossed the stream of death that separates 
world from world. 

Man's life and death are within him. There is no 
one outside that wants to win his soul. Man lives alone: 
alone he dies. Oh, what a solitude! But he need not 
say, as he walks, dies ira, for if he is trying to live the 
Christ life he may sing out, Oh, beautiful day of judg- 
183 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

ment! thou comest anew in the evening of each day 
well spent. The good heart cannot escape thy wreaths 
and crowns. The court of heaven is raining down its 
joyful verdicts upon each forehead that beams with 
righteousness and mercy. The flowery days of June 
come only once in the year, but to the Christlike the 
beautiful day of judgment comes all through the sum- 
mer's verdure and the winter's snow. Religion begins 
not when the mind finds God and eternal life in all their 
fullness, but when it starts toward them. As information 
always rises up anew before the student, as it inspires by 
being in the advance — a sea uncrossed — so religion is not a 
possession, but a pursuit. That heart is full of salvation 
which is always seeking its God. After death heaven will 
come not to those who found it while they were upon 
earth, but to those who always looked for it here. They 
sought Him in the stars, in the fields, in the events, in the 
soul, and in the temple; heaven they looked for in the 
openings in the clouds, and beyond the setting sun, looked 
through tears and prayers — all which patience and hope- 
ful looking is the genius of Christianity. Would that 
such a Christianity could be extended until no home, no 
soul, could pass a day away from its inspiration and 
happiness. Can we see the red sky of the evening 
and not see the colors of man's life ? The soul's roses 
never fade. God's love is not garnered up beyond the 
grave. Good hearts are constantly rewarded. The 
angels that carry sweet verdicts to the soul are always 
on the wing. 



184 



BE MEEK IN SPIRIT 

Among the questions which composed the Christian 
child's catechism fifty years ago, flourished this inquiry, 
' Who was the meekest man ? ' The honor of the answer 
fell upon Moses. This reply rested upon the remark 
made in the book of Numbers, that ' the man Moses was 
very meek, even above all the men which were upon the 
face of the earth.' 

Our book-making fathers ought to have remembered 
that many great and noble persons have lived in this world 
since that estimate was made of earth's meekest men, 
and that the fact of Christ and His apostles and of mil- 
lions of St. Johns and St. Marks and similar worthies 
and martyrs ought to have justified some later estimate 
and appraisement of such moral worth. The entire 
Mosaic age, with all its manhood, womanhood, and 
childhood, stands related to the Christian era much as 
the moonlight ranks with a great outpouring from the sun. 

But it was the misfortune of our fathers that they 
could not find any important difference between the book 
of Numbers and the Sermon on the Mount, nor find in 
Christ or St. John any moral beauty which they might 
not find in the battle-fields of Moses and Joshua. There 
was many a moral charm in Moses ; but it would be doing 
a great injustice to Christianity were he declared meeker 
than Sir Isaac Newton or George Fox, or more soft of 
footstep than Henry Bergh. We are all bound to confess 
that Christ has crossed our world ; and that after Him 
there has sprung up a moral excellence which did not flow 
widely or deeply before He came. Think what each 
may of the nature of Christ, all seem compelled to confess 
that He gave a wonderful impulse to a very high type of 
human character. 

185 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

Here and there has come some genius who has created 
a new era of painting or sculpture; or some genius under 
whose touch music has become a thousand-fold more 
rich and sweet; or some mind which has driven forward 
the golden chariot of poetry or literature; or some mind 
which has assembled words and thoughts into eloquence 
— and into a planet liable to be thus storm-tossed Christ 
came to set new fashions for the soul, and to make art and 
eloquence find a rivalry in human character. Against 
a beautiful statue or a beautiful picture or a beautiful 
poem, there came a genius who could delineate an at- 
tractive soul. 

Whoever would appreciate this single utterance must 
repudiate the word ' meek. ' It no longer tells us what 
Christ said or meant. It probably never did contain 
more than a small part of the Palestine import. In the 
days when the Bible was rendered into English the ideal 
Christian was described as a stoop-shouldered, melan- 
choly, complaining creature, always wondering that he 
was permitted to exist, always confessing that by right he 
ought to be suffering punishment for both natural and 
acquired depravity. 

All this self-debasement was called meekness. It 
certainly was not the intention of Christ to glorify such 
a quality of mind and to proclaim a time when such a 
dullness would inherit the earth. The oldest manuscript 
of the text is written in Greek, and it says, 'Blessed are 
the mild-mannered and gentle. ' Plato and Xenophon 
both use the term to express the softening of a character 
or an age. It is used by Xenophon to express music 
when it sinks into its lowest and sweetest tones. The 
term was used to express the calmness of a heart which 
had conquered passion. It implied halcyon days — 
days not of self-reproach, but of a serenity in both the 
world and in God. As a Latin equivalent, which for 
centuries lay alongside the Greek term, it stood for all that 
was gentler in not only the mind, but also in nature; 
186 



BE MEEK IN SPIRIT 



stood for nations which were becoming more refined, and 
for grapes which were sweetening in the autumn, and for 
an orator whose bitter words were changing into sympa- 
thy and pathos. This is the term which in our century 
finds no translation in the word ' meekness. ' The word 
'meek' is only a prison in which the bird from Greece 
and Palestine dies without plumage and without song. 
Oftentimes a translation is only the transfer of a leaf 
instead of the tree, as girls visiting a prairie or the National 
Park bring back with them some flowers or fern pressed 
in a book. These white, jeweled hands are kind, but 
they cannot translate for us the immensity of the west. 
A pressed flower will not say much of that vast arena, 
where the sun has poured out its heat and color for a 
million years. 

If we would read perfectly this beatitude it would be 
necessary for us to use all those English terms which 
have slowly risen up among their classic original. As the 
single grain of wheat when sown in rich ground produces 
not a single stalk, but a cluster, so each great classic 
term has in the deep soil of Europe and England become 
a cluster of ideas. The single plant which once grew at 
the feet of Christ has become a garden full of fruits and 
beauty. When the words 'Blessed the meek' are pro- 
nounced, there should rise up before the imagination all 
those who have carried in their hearts the highest wisdom, 
the tenderest justice, the deepest love, the kindest voices, 
known to our race. 

The memory may recall if it chooses a multitude of 
minds all colored with one tint of character, and the roll 
need not end with the Fenelons and Cowpers, but it may 
admit into its grouping such beings as Helen Hunt and 
Emerson and Longfellow and Lowell. The roll must 
not admit only perfection, for admitting only the perfect 
it would contain but one name. It must claim all those 
who have pointed society towards all the glories of human- 
ity. Blessed all those who in all their years stand by the 

187 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

great river of human being to purify and sweeten it as it 

flows. Some affirm that in his later days Mr. Lowell did 

not walk as lovingly among men as he had strolled along 

in his early manhood; that he became dazzled by the 

externalities of wealth and rank; but if such charges were 

true, they would leave the name still wonderfully blessed 

on account of that long period of national cloud and toil 

through which his harp sounded only mercy, love, and 

justice. 

' Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide 
In the strife of truth and falsehood for the good or evil side.' 

This hour came to Mr. Lowell, and his decision as- 
sumed an eloquence more powerful than guns. More 
nobly than Lord Byron he ' Touched his harp and nations 
heard entranced. ' 

Old as the world is, and active as it has been, it has not 
produced a good average human character. The only 
consolation is found in the thought that the great and 
gifted workman is still toiling over the task. It is com- 
forting to know that the human heart is more attractive 
now than when the centuries began the tremendous work 
of making something good out of man. It is wonderful 
that when the ancients sat down to invent twelve great 
labors for Hercules to perform, they did not conceive the 
idea of asking the giant to make somewhere a perfect 
town, or village, or hamlet for all the passing and future 
ages to behold in dumb wonderment, a place where the 
mind should be broad and honest, and the heart gentle. 
Great reforms were dreamed of, for when the lions closed 
their mouths in the presence of Daniel, when the wild 
beasts and even the trees were inspired by the music of 
Orpheus, when the dog Cereberus grew mild and gentle 
over the honeyed cake flung to him by the daring traveler 
each story hinted at the existence of a power of mildness 
and love, before which brute force would turn to meek- 
ness. The burden of each legend that gentleness would 
be blessed forever. 

188 



BE MEEK IN SPIRIT 



But while all these stories contained a dream of better 
things, little effort was made in the direction of developing 
and perfecting the human character. Often art and 
cruelty ran along side by side for a thousand years. It 
seemed impossible for beauty to pass over from marble 
and bronze to the spirit. The Phoenicians led the old 
world in commerce, art, and all genius, but they sold their 
own children into slavery, as the moderns sell the horse 
or the ox. With the Spartans tears were a weakness; 
with the Hebrews revenge and deep curses were worked 
up into poetry and song, as fitting elements in the worship 
of God. To create a good manhood seemed a hopeless task. 

It is estimated that the Niagara River was a certain 
number of ages in cutting its channel from Lake Ontario 
to the present cataract; it is conjectured that our planet 
was certain millions of years in elaborating its soil, its 
rainfall, its climate, its trees, its birds, but it is not known 
how long it has taken man to eliminate the tons of iron 
and brass from his character, nor is it conjectured how 
long it will yet be before he will reach the end of his 
historic meanness. That human nature is undergoing a 
slow refinement cannot well be doubted. The mind may 
well infer from the general progress of earth that man is 
also advancing. 

In that awful forward movement which astronomers 
detect, man's heart is involved. If the universe advances, 
it must take man along. If the terrific animals have 
died to make a little room for the birds of song, if the 
lark makes her nest in the blossoming grasses where 
serpents once hissed, if sweet apples fall where sour, 
bitter fruit once covered the September ground, the infer- 
ence ought to be that the human race is moving away 
from its own hissing serpent, and is being changed by and 
along with the changing scene. 

To this argument of inference one may add the argu- 
ment of fact. The spectacle of the times is that of a 
softening heart. Humanity has not become reformed, 

189 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

but it has been touched. It has not become colored with 
great, deep, red love like that which Christ wore, but 
it has become tinted. The modern character is not black. 
Often it reveals many traces of beauty. Each republic 
ruling where despots once ruled is a triumph of kindness ; 
each new law enacted in the name of justice and benevo- 
lence is a new blush of color on the human face. Each 
new institution to promote happiness is a smile on the 
lips — a tear of sympathy. 

If any one will read the satires of the classics, the 
reader will find them less true than they were in old 
Rome and Athens. Character has risen above them. 
Juvenal assailed even the scholars and statesmen of his 
day and painted pictures that would be false in all the 
great nations of our times. No modern poet would per- 
haps take the pains to write or to publish a 'Tristia' 
like that of Ovid. Such ' Sad Thoughts' have been made 
false by the amenities of a higher civilization. In Ovid's 
lament come these words : 

' While you are in prosperity you will be able to count 
many friends, but if sad days come, you will be alone. 
See how the doves build in the new towers, while the old 
roof has not a single bird. You will never see the ants 
filing along to an empty storehouse, nor friendship journey- 
ing toward one who has lost his wealth. As the shadow 
attends only when the sun is shining brightly and goes 
away at the coming of a cloud, thus the crowd will follow 
while one's day is bright, but when clouds come they will 
disappear.' 

Except upon a small scale these words are true no 
longer, for our whole age is moved deeply by the desire 
to bless those upon whose sky some cloud has come. 
The burden of all the modern thought of the state, the 
church, and the press is the welfare of those who have 
long been unhappy. Many of our great men are poor 
in money, but they are rich in honors and friends. There 
is, indeed, still too much of the rock in the human char- 

190 



BE MEEK IN SPIRIT 



acter, but a great change for the better has come since 
Ovid and Dante poured out their tears in bitter and 
unjust exile. There is a slow drifting toward the idea, 
Blessed are the mild and merciful. 

The greatest problem which was ever before our race, 
or which is now before it, is how to create the best and 
most universal human character. It has always been 
desirable to know how to produce the most wheat from 
the acre, how to exact the most heat from the least fuel, 
and how to make the small salary meet the most wants; 
but the most tremendous problem of all has been how to 
create the greatest society. This problem has not been 
the most seen or the best known. It has been hidden 
behind the field of wheat and the gallery of art, but it 
has been on hand in all times, and here it is to-day in all 
its measurelessness. The question how to create great men 
and great women belittles all other inquiries. We should 
all die of despair could we not look back and see a time 
when the ideal man was only a warrior, valuable only on 
account of his bow and arrow and club, and when woman 
was valuable because she could take care of the fighter's 
food and clothes. A single glance backward makes us 
all love the nineteenth century, for in its fairer fields we 
can see man and woman alike great in mental and moral 
nature, each a distinct soul, neither soul being greater 
because each is infinite. 

The problem how to create a better public is still 
weighing heavily upon all thoughtful minds. It is prob- 
able that our public ideals are still too low. It is almost 
certain that we do not see clearly enough the intellectual 
and moral side of the universe. We may be as material 
as those ants of Ovid, which traveled only toward gran- 
aries full of corn. Our eyes are not spiritual enough to 
be able to see the stores of learning, wisdom, love, and 
beauty which stand along every path. To this blind- 
ness both the church and state have contributed; for 
while the church has denounced the idea of being saved 
191 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

by a noble character, the state has educated its youth 
for only a career of business. Salvation and education 
have both been purely 'business transactions.' 

Only a matchless greatness can interpret the words of 
Jesus: Blessed are they who step softly upon the great 
planet made by God, who feel the presence of others 
besides self, who confess the rights which encompass all 
life, from that of man to that of the beasts of the field. 
Blessed the gentle. A little utterance, but the eighteen 
Christian centuries have failed to fathom its depths. 

Religion is making some advance, for one must not 
esteem lightly an age which is placing the word amo 
above the word credo, for all history illustrates the fact 
that to love is better than to believe. Education and 
religion might so live and so act as to cause human char- 
acter to part with much of its iron and flint in the years 
just before us. They must first abandon the idea that 
hardness is power. In the realm of metals and stones, 
hardness is ability, but in the kingdom of the mind the 
phenomenon is reversed, and the softness of the soul has 
been the most titanic force known to our race. 

This power of love and refinement must have been 
assumed in the declaration that the meek would inherit 
the earth. What will inherit this great domain of man ? 
Will bloody war ever wear a perpetual crown ? Is cruelty 
ever to become a noble end of being? Is an iron-like 
selfishness ever to become the chief end of humanity? 
No one of these names is worthy of a final empire. The 
coming conqueror is a much gentler spirit. What spirit 
is that which has made the literature and the wisdom 
and art and learning of all times ? Mark well the hand 
which has touched the harp of letters. See it in Athens 
or Rome, in Italy or Germany, or France or England. 
It has always been a kind hand. Philosophy has always 
been kind as a woman. Confucius and Plato wrote as 
kindly as wrote the Nazarene; Newton and Sir William 
Hamilton and Stuart Mill made philosophy as gentle as 
192 



BE MEEK IN SPIRIT 



a song. The greatest kindness has always been the 
greatest power. 

There is a kind of meekness which will surely inherit 
the earth. It will take possession in the name of the 
highest right. When an explorer discovers an island or 
a continent, he raises upon its shore the flag of his nation. 
His nation found it, reclaimed it from solitude and from 
monsters, and thus owns it. This is the law which shall 
give the earth to the gentle souls. They have discovered 
our world; they have sailed to its shores; they have made 
the earth with their own tender but creative hands; they 
found it a wild region; they have covered it with their 
music, with thought, with sentiment, with art, with phi- 
losophy, with friendship, with piety, and now in justice 
and beauty their flag waves over it. Meekness ought to 
own the world it creates. 

In the blazing light of these things we should easily 
see that society is waiting for a better character to come — 
is waiting for the human heart to be freed from its old 
iron and rock. In these years of waiting, all who can 
must run on in advance of their day. It is well to be 
fully up to one's age when one thinks of the shame found 
in being behind it; and when one thinks of the power 
and splendor possible to man, it is almost disgraceful to 
be only up to one's country. The best soul must run 
far ahead of its period, because the age must walk, but 
the soul can fly. All those who read most deeply the 
needs and powers of man fling their hearts toward the 
future and then enjoy the happiness of seeing society creep 
along toward the new goal. The greatest Greek dram- 
atist said: 'I do not write plays for man as he is, but 
for man as he should be.' Out of this principle came 
his sublimity, and there remains a sublimity still for all 
those who will, Christ-like, leave the age far behind and 
drag it onward by running along in beauty before it. 
Fling your hearts forward thirty years and you will in 
great joy overtake them here, or else in heaven. 

193 



THE SON OF MAN 

The title Son of Man is applied to Jesus about a 
half-hundred times in the New Testament. It is in 
itself almost a complete definition of the person to whom 
it is applied. He was not the son of some family of 
district or city or state or tribe. He excelled all before 
Him by being the Son of the human race. He was too 
great to be a Jew, too great to be a Gentile. He was the 
Son of Man. 

That term was not accidental. The most influential 
nations back of the New Testament were the Hebrew and 
the Greek peoples. These both were partial to human 
equality and liberty. The Mosaic age was a revolt 
against despotism. The career of the twelve tribes was, 
in the main, repeated by the revolt of our own thirteen 
colonies. In the two lands and ages so far apart there 
was the one estimate of humanity. The Israelites longed 
for a republic. The elders were to rule. No law could 
be passed by any power except a convention of the older 
men. The gleaning Ruth was as great as any woman in 
the land; and Nathan the prophet made David heart- 
sick by means of the story of the poor man and the 
little lamb. The Sabbath laws reached not only every 
human being, but they extended to the oxen that plowed 
the fields. Thus the Hebrew tribes held within them- 
selves the idea of human equality, and never in any sense 
abandoned that principle. The Hebrew laws regarding 
strangers, widows, and orphans were exceedingly humane, 
and were all adorned with the words, 'for we were suf- 
ferers once in the land of Egypt, ' and we cannot impose 
upon others what we could not endure for ourselves. 
However despotic David and Solomon may have become, 
the Hebrew literature and the prophets carried onward 
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THE SON OF MAN 



the genius of the early republic, and when Isaiah and 
Malachi came to their song in the last years of that nation, 
the equality of mankind reappeared in the prophecies, and 
when finally Judea went down her sun set as it had risen — 
in the splendor of human liberty. 

The history of Athens did not differ widely from the 
history of Jerusalem. The two cities do not seem much 
alike, but the differences are upon the surface rather than 
in the heart. Language, dress, architecture, and custom 
never determine any questions of merit and principle. 
Socrates may not have looked much like Emerson, or have 
lived much in the Concord fashion, but the Greek and 
the American were much alike. The two minds were as 
one. Thus Athens and Jerusalem were intellectual sis- 
ters. They differed in poetry and art, and did not dress 
alike, but on all great days the two walked hand in hand. 
Plato and Saint John were in sympathy. The political 
ideas of Paul were in accord with those of Xenophon. 
Their views of God, liberty, and woman were one and the 
same. 

When James, whom we now call ' Saint, ' said that 
If there come into your synagogue a man with a gold 
ring and fine clothing, and there come also a poor man in 
mean dress, and you pay marked attention to the man 
with the gold ring, he was in perfect accord with the 
Hebrew and Greek nations which had sunk before the 
armies of Rome. Although Rome could conquer Athens 
and Jerusalem, it could not destroy their learning and 
genius. Israel and Greece had been cherishing human 
liberty and right for a thousand years, and although the 
military power of the Romans was the greatest of that 
epoch, Greek and Hebrew thought was more powerful 
than the armies of the Caesars, and while those victorious 
troops were marching east in triumph, the Eastern 
thought was flowing westward in a triumph as great. In 
the end the Roman flags were to be transient, the Greek 
and Hebrew truth everlasting. 

195 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

Such a glance at the oldest past throws light upon the 
words, Son of Man. Jesus of Nazareth was not the 
obsequious friend of the man with the gold ring; He was 
also the friend of the man of common apparel. He 
summed up and intensified all the broad thought that 
had bloomed between Abraham and Gamaliel; He lived 
where the roads from Greece and Judea met to run west- 
ward. 

Christ possessed all the wisdom of the past, but to this 
He added a divineness of soul. He was so fervent that 
His ideas became a glowing life. Socrates was intel- 
lectual, and loved to argue over abstract ideas. Jesus 
to a more perfect moral philosophy added an incessant 
action. He was a point at which all old truths began to 
live, each its rich life. The century-plant blooms once 
in each hundred years. The Son of Man was not the 
day of the first planting, but the day of the full bloom. 
The long century of waiting ran out in Him. He was 
the blooming day of the past. 

If one should ask what qualities ought to be found 
great and active in an ideal son of humanity, the answer 
would come in these words: His style of speech should 
be simple. The human race is vast in size, and is com- 
posed of many grades of mental power, and of many kinds 
of intellectual habit. There is a simple music which does 
not care how many millions of human beings there are 
on the earth, nor what may be their color, or age, or con- 
dition; it is sweet to all. The Gregorian chants would 
certainly give joy to a savage and to a philosopher. Their 
tones are only those which may be laden with sentiment. 
The rhythm is like the beating of a bass drum. The 
hearer seems himself to be marching toward heaven. 
The time is one the heart loves to keep. The notes 
awaken no anxiety, they are full of peace. 

A few minds may extract some pleasure from com- 
positions more intricate and running higher and lower, 
and with the melody more interwoven with a hundred 

196 



THE SON OF MAN 



variations, but there is a simple music in which the entire 
human family meets in one happiness. So is there a 
speech, a simplicity of statement, welcome to all. There 
is a style that excludes no mind. Not only will all tolerate 
it, but all love it. Like the Gregorian chant, it asks that 
the human family be its auditors. It is welcome as a 
sunbeam, it is as dear to all of us as the stars. Such was 
the intellectual simplicity of Christ's utterance. It was 
a Gregorian chant. 

His philosophy was the exact parallel of his language. 
It did not repose upon authority alone, but upon that 
reason which is as universal as the five senses. The 
utterances of the Sermon on the Mount are in their truth- 
fulness self-evident. When first heard, some of them 
may seem too lofty for this world, but time commends 
them, and at last society rises up toward their height. It 
at first seems a weakness to bless those who curse you, 
but in the end the blessing will bear fruit in the next year 
or the next generation, and it will change curses into 
praise. The great aim of each life must be to bless society, 
and man must not waste his time in working out some 
petty revenge; he must continue his well-doing, even if 
the kindness may fall upon an enemy. In the system of 
Jesus, revenge played no part. His scheme of duty and 
service moved on like the sunshine. One of the most sav- 
age and common of human pleasures is to break a 
heart. In the teachings of Jesus this pleasure was wholly 
wanting. In that philosophy love ran out toward all, 
and if in some it was not merited, it passed through them 
into the next generation, and there found its harvest of 
goodness. Often in taking revenge on a father, we lose 
the good will of his children. All of Christ's teaching 
assumes the reality and greatness of to-morrow. The 
teachings of Jesus are fitted for the long life of man upon 
earth. All who follow Him will find the far future as 
splendid as the dreams of the present. Life in Christ is 
an eternal progress. 

197 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

Jesus' life is a perpetual school for all ages. It did 
not rely upon wealth for happiness. It drew most of its 
blessedness from within. To our country, where the 
heart prefaces all its plans with the wish that it had a 
million dollars, the life of Jesus ought to come like a 
voice from the sky. When our children are reared among 
the incessant wishings for money, there ought to be a new 
demand for the story of One who extracted blessedness 
from life itself. 

The hills, the woods, the homes, the people, the phi- 
losophies around Christ were his fortune. He did not 
need to wish for a million dollars, for the wisdom of the 
world came to him inexpensively. He needed not to long 
for wealth, for the tears of pity came to his cheek without 
cost. He need not grieve for more gold, for He could 
think up His beatitudes, and could compose the Lord's 
Prayer without any outlay of coins. He need not mortgage 
his cottage to gratify taste, for the lilies made no charge 
for their perfume, and the birds no charge for their song. 
Our human race never saw elsewhere such a happiness 
all coming up from the mind alone. In the presence of 
such a being life ought itself to be an exhaustless fortune. 
Man's blessedness need not come from his property, but 
from his education. Only the spirit can be rich. 

It would seem that this Son of Man ought to become 
rapidly the study and guide of our period. No former 
period ever made so near an approach to his genius. No 
other period ever loved so much that simplicity of language 
and that rationalism of thought and that devotion to the 
people which are seen in this one personage. Those dark 
abstractions which delighted our fathers, and gave us 
great volumes of theology, have outlived their popularity. 
The American world at least asks for only the simplest 
principles of faith and conduct. 

Its literary style is that of Franklin and Webster — 
names far apart, but joined by one simplicity; its intel- 
lectual style is rational like that thought which brushed 



THE SON OF MAN 



away kings, and enthroned the people; its heart is that of 
benevolence and hope; its religion is tending toward a 
piety of mingled worship and action. The virtues which 
have made our nation are happily those which Christ 
caught in His arms when the past was falling in ruins 
around Him. Our nation did not intend to draw near 
to the man of Nazareth, but our fathers did intend to 
draw near to a high and free intellect; they intended to 
live for the people; to speak words the people could under- 
stand; and to exalt virtues and suppress wrongs; and in 
carrying out these vast human ideas they have unwittingly 
led us into the philosophy of Jesus. Truths are all in 
harmony, and when great minds pursue great paths they 
must expect soon to meet. Our nation, founded upon 
the rights and happiness of man, ought to reckon as its 
own child the Son of Man. The nation of humanity 
and the Son of humanity ought to be fast friends forever. 

In Nazareth there is a morality, in Him a simplicity, 
an absence of luxury; in Him there is a human equality, 
a democracy, that combine to make Him the spiritual 
leader of such a planet. He and America should be at 
peace. 

Our age has come upon a new task, a task never at- 
tempted before — that of educating all the people into the 
thought and belief that Christianity is nothing else than 
their own wisdom and happiness. It is not some church 
scheme; it is not something Roman or English, or Protes- 
tant; it is simply something intensely human, but it is so 
human that the natural intellect cannot escape its prin- 
ciples, and the natural heart cannot escape its wide love. 

The church holds in her hand a cross, but it does not 
await new victims. It is wreathed with flowers. There is 
coming along rapidly the ideal of Christ as a perfect man- 
hood. The cross of Christ stands for only one day of His 
history; His moral beauty stands for all His life, all His 
mind and soul. We may well wreathe the cross with 
flowers, for the two pieces of wood stand for a dark day 

199 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

on Mount Calvary; the flowers stand for all the blossom- 
ing years on earth and in heaven. Each fragment of a 
broken vase may be beautiful, and, as the Irish song- 
weaver said, may hold long the perfume of the roses the 
whole vase once contained, yet better than the fragment 
is the whole vase with all the roses in full beauty. The 
tendency of our age is, have the whole vase and it full. 
From the progress which has marked late years we can 
foresee a time not far away when Christ will be carried 
along in all His divine and human symmetry. The vase 
will be unbroken and the flowers shall never fade. 

Many are saying: 'Are we not following simply an 
ideal ? Was there ever such a person ? Has not time, 
has not affection, exaggerated the Son of Judea?' We 
can never know certainly in this life what may be the 
quantity of the Deity in this Son of Man, or Son of God, 
but in our estimates of Him as a perfect Savior we have 
not over-rated Him, nor rated Him at the full. Instead 
of being only an empty ideal, the emptiness is all in our 
hearts. Taken in His most rigid realism, He is still far 
above and beyond our age. As an absolute reality Christ 
is beyond us. 

The common impression that the ideal is false, and 
that the real is always something true but inferior and 
common, is all error. When a flower has all its leaves 
perfect it is an ideal blossom, but it is such a reality that 
it will bring the most of money in the December market. 
When civil liberty omitted the black man, it was not an 
ideal liberty; when it omitted woman, it was not a good 
liberty; but when our Nation opened the road and put all 
human hearts into it, it became an ideal freedom. But 
is not the great freedom of to-day as real as was that of 
fifty years ago ? Is liberty less real when it becomes the 
most perfect ? 

The more ideal the liberty, the more real, for it takes 
hold of more human life and hurls the nation along in 
more of power. If then there came into our world a per- 
200 



THE SON OF MAN 



son who would rather be wise than be rich; who wished 
to live with God and in God ; who loved the moral law as 
a mother loves her child ; whose joy was in doing good ; 
whose heart embraced the world in its love; who thought 
of only the happiness of mankind, and who died for 
humanity, that person was both ideal and real. If he 
did unto others as he would they should do to him, that 
was an idealism and a realism joined in one beauty. The 
golden rule is the perfection of idealism, but it is also as 
real as the earth and the sun. The Sermon on the Mount 
is the greatest piece of realism ever written. Is nothing 
real except that which is defective? Is a real human 
face only one that is ugly? In Christ moral realism is 
abundant, but it is faultless. The flower has all its leaves. 
When the famous Russian painter displayed here a 
few years ago his great paintings, among them were two 
scenes in the life of Jesus. On the one canvas stood His 
boyhood home; on the other He wanders alone on the 
rocky coast of Tiberias. Some critics said, 'What rude- 
ness in the treatment ! How the artist degrades the Divine 
Man! His home is among fowls and goats. It is humble. 
A hundred dollars would replace all the structure and its 
surroundings. And as to the lonely being on the sea- 
shore it looks like a common, ill-fed, ill-paid laborer. 
There is no charm in the raiment. What miserable art!' 
But these critics were all in error, for in the middle of all 
such humble material things the soul may touch the sky. 
The chickens and the goats did not touch that human 
heart. Perhaps that soul may have fed them and called 
them by name. We do not measure Socrates by finding 
the worth of his dwelling-house. Thus we are not to 
estimate Christ by His coat or His sandal. The painter 
must copy these accidents from the time and the place, 
and then ask the spirit of Christ to take care of itself. If 
the person who gazes at these two pictures has as much in 
his own heart as there is out of it, the little, cheap home 
will seem grand as a palace, and the lonely working man on 

201 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

the rocky beach will become lofty like the Son of God. 
It is folly to expect to find much outside of the heart that 
has little within. 

Of all times our age thinks most adequately, most 
truly, most deeply of Christ. It gathers up the fragments 
of the past. It takes from the old church the idea of a 
lamb slain for us. It accepts from the Catholic woman 
the Man of Sorrows. It can shed tears over the scars left 
by nail and thorn. It can say 'We live by faith,' but 
it passes beyond all the past, and gathers up a glory the 
past never saw — a Jesus of spotless morality and infinite 
love, who changes men into His own image, and makes 
love the cardinal doctrine of all rational life. May the 
coming years gather up all the scattered pieces of Christ 
and soon offer Him to society as its perfect Savior. 

In the simple religion there is a greatness which only 
the greatest music and eloquence can express. The 
grander the doctrines of the church, the more impressive 
may be the beauty which they may wear. 

Man does not live in a desert. It pleased the Creator 
to make wondrously beautiful the world of His children. 
All that these children make and have shall catch some- 
thing from ornament, from the very planet on which they 
dwell. 

When Christianity shall teach its simplest form of 
doctrine it will still be in the world of music and color, and 
all sweet and rich beauty. It will ask ten thousand voices 
to join in its song; it may ask all instruments to accompany 
the multitude in their hymn ; it may invite more flowers to 
its altars, and then to the material emblems of what the 
heart loves the simplified church will add a pulpit which 
can have no themes but great ones, and which can easily 
find that eloquence which as aroma lies hidden in sandal- 
wood, lies high and deep in the being of God, in the life 
and deeds of Christ, in the relation of man to man, and 
in the mysterious flow of our race toward death, and the 
scenes beyond. 

202 



THE RACE OF SEVENTY MILES 

Paul was a trumpeter. He sounded his clear, high 
notes and aroused all the passions of an army. The music 
was none the less the powerful because it was so spir- 
itual, and the army was none the less real because it was 
to march in the name of the kingdom of heaven. Paul 
might have pleaded with a musician in the fable, 'I am 
unarmed,' but the plea was made useless by the fact 
that behind Paul the tumult was great. Changes were 
taking place rapidly, and unless a rush of opinions could 
be checked it would require many swords and spears to 
arrest what began in the softness of speech. 

In advance of Paul one had run along who also was 
unarmed. Christ might have said, 'I am no soldier; I 
am a mild, kind voice'; but the plea would have been 
of little value in the presence of a swaying and falling 
world. The court of Herod or Pilate would have said 
to the captive, 'That silver trumpet which thou carriest 
is more powerful than ten thousand darts.' Christ and 
Paul were both put to death because of the trumpet each 
held in the hand. There are tones that awaken all the 
powers of the soul. They do not tell man what to do, 
what to believe, nor where to go, but they dispel all 
indolence and all despair, and bring a strange feeling that 
there is a great God and a great human destiny. 

It will be in vain critics shall look into the New Testa- 
ment to find some words came not by revelation, if only 
that book will place before us the pictures of noble men 
and women who would rather be martyrs than carry 
lifeless hearts. 

Christ's tears, John's affection, Paul's zeal, were the 
highest form of inspiration. These persons ran the race 
set before them. The figure was born of Paul's fervor. 

203 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

It was not accidental. Man's motion was not a walking 
or a creeping, but a running. It was running in the 
presence of a great cloud of witnesses. It was all a gala 
day in one sense. The witnesses were present from all 
climes and ages. The banners of Egypt waved along 
with those of Greece and Judea. The intellect may 
make a few errors if only there is an undying zeal in the 
heart. Our great generals in the war of the union made 
many mistakes, and thousands of soldiers died by intel- 
lectual errors. Needless bloodshed made slippery many 
a hill, many a wagon-road; but time forgives all these 
mental infirmities because the men who revealed them 
loved the nation and faced death for that love. Much 
forgiven because they loved much. The vast sentiment 
rolled on and made holy all the mistakes of the sad battle- 
field. Thus inspiration sweeps on and carries errors as 
the gulf stream carries seaweed and wreckage from clime 
to clime. 

Virtue and learning must be attached to a perpetual 
buoyancy of the spirit. Much as the favorite poem of 
Mr. Lincoln is admired and enjoyed, it can never enter 
deeply into the cause of humanity. Its music is not in- 
spiring. The trumpeter who should play only that poem, 

' Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud ? ' 

could not justly be condemned for urging soldiers onward 
to battle; rather should he be acquitted for making music 
that were a death knell of all the great hopes of our race. 
Man ought to feel that clouds are temporary, the sun 
eternal. This is not the advice given mankind by only 
poetry; it is the demand made us by civilization. Civiliz- 
ation is the final result of all the inspired hearts that have 
ever lived. It has not come to us from India and Persia, 
where the mind sleeps, and wakens only to write the 
literature of oblivion; it is all come from minds that sung 
of human greatness and praised the world for its inex- 
pressible beauty. If we look back to find the source of 

204 



THE RACE OF SEVENTY MILES 

modern society, we find the greatest fountains in the hill 
of Attica. Some great nation must have lived before 
Greece came, for Homer did not make his own fortune. 
He must have inherited vast estates from some unknown 
mother. No backwoodsman ever came out of the pri- 
meval forest bringing with him such a language, such a 
philosophy, such learning, such culture. Verses like the 
Odyssey do not grow upon trees. Back of Franklin and 
Lincoln lay an England and an America; so back of 
Homer lay a great state whose harps had become unstrung 
and whose walls had returned to the dust. Greece was 
the Arethusa of some lost stream. 

Homer and those back of him had not painted the 
sadness and the failures of man, had not kept the beauty 
of life in the background and the tomb in front, but all 
had piped like the skylark the morning song of the sun. 
The women all were rich in physical and spiritual beauty; 
the men were all heroes. The soldier's shield was of 
silver and gold. Their chariots ran rapidly. The horses 
were often thought immortal; and the instant we wander 
away from men so glorified we come to mountains full 
of divine beings. The Graces appear by a fountain; 
The foot of Diana rustles in the fallen leaves; the forest 
trees whisper at the breath of some passing god. 

It is nothing of defect that the Greek picture is now 
seen as larger than some parts of life, for the truth proven 
is the same, namely, that civilization is made by the 
inspiration, the divinity stored away in the human soul. 
The picture is only in some respects larger than the 
reality, but not in many respects, for man is a being 
whose wonders no imagination can overdraw. Achilles, 
Agamemnon, Patroclus, are always greater than any 
poetry; and Andromache, with her little son in her arms, 
is a beautiful, half-divine mystery no earthly genius can 
ever portray. Life surpasses art. 

To the active, noble man and woman no voice is heard 
whispering, you are to die to-night. One feeling domi- 
205 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

nates long and gloriously, the feeling of eternal youth. 
By an argument man may prove that he will not be long 
in this world, but he can never prove the proposition by 
his heart. When man reads that all flesh is like the 
flower of grass, he applies the lesson to some other form 
than his own. As for himself, he has come here to live. 
He assigns death to his neighbors, but by some under- 
standing with the universe he has come to stay. 

Thus all humanity has run the race set before it. It 
has carried in its hand no autumn leaves. It always 
selects buds or open blossoms. It prefers to ride in the 
bow of the ship, because it loves to gaze into the future 
rather than into the past. It will not cherish any dream 
except that of immortality. When man, educated and 
righteous, dies at the age of seventy years, sixty-five of 
these years have been buoyant. They have been full of 
inspiration. Learned as the Scaligus, or moderately 
learned, like William Wirt or Henry Clay, man's heart 
has always been full to the brim. Of the average high 
life, sixty years of each seventy has been full of a spiritual 
glory. Gcethe says the universal mind of God is ' work- 
ing at the loom, weaving for the Deity garments of life.' 
Man, then, must be a part of this weaver, for he is a 
mind, a soul. In sixty years out of seventy he weaves 
nothing but the richest silk. His imagination does not 
love to work at cheap, common goods. Figuier says: 
' The suicide is one out of whose soul all beautiful dreams 
have gone.' 

No youth, no manhood, no womanhood, can run the 
race set before humanity, and at the same time carry any 
vice. The vices are not only bad from what they are, 
but they are bad in what they exclude. The heart wedded 
to a vice is divorced from all enthusiasm to the universe. 
When a magnificent city is ruled by vice, all its magnifi- 
cence is vain, for the vice is soon more splendid than the 
city. Any bad habit, be it that of the opium-eater, or 
of the drunkard, or of the glutton, eclipses the world and 

206 



THE RACE OF SEVENTY MILES 

empties the heart of all inspiration. Almost millions of 
young men are now living in our land who do not belong 
to its greatness; do not belong to its higher education, 
its purpose, its liberty, its beauty. Many of them have 
wealth, but they possess no inspiration. Their souls are 
heavy with degradation. 

The meaning and value of inspiration may be seen 
in the career of those men who have been the world's 
orators. They have been compelled to be men of zeal. 

Mr. Curtis said : ' An orator is a man who can speak 
so as to be heard and who says things which men want 
to hear. The first part of this qualification is constant.' 

The orator is always one who can be heard, but to 
say what each new age wishes to hear implies a constant 
accumulation of ideas, imports, arguments, allusions, 
duties, and hopes ; so that the wealth of speech in the old 
Roman forum would be the poverty of speech in England. 
What flowers are to the school-girl, what music was to 
Mozart, what nature was to Linnseus, the wants of society 
are to the orator. He thinks only of mankind, he loves 
nothing else. From Demosthenes to Wendell Phillips, 
the orator has taken no theme smaller than a nation; 
and, therefore, led by such subjects, oratory has always 
been a rush of inspiration. Its style is not that of common 
speech. It pleads, it persuades, it says "Come," and we 
follow. It is not an encyclopedia, but a trumpet. 

Nearly all orators have stood before men like freedom's 
generals at the head of freedom's armies; and the begin- 
ning, middle, and end of the oration has been the word 
"Come." India and China had no orators, because 
there was no grand path along which humanity was to 
move. The word ' ' Come" was wanting. 

No wonder that when Mozoomdar reached his native 
land fresh from his great summer in America, the people 
by thousands welcomed him and waved banners on winch 
were the words 'Hail to the New Dispensation.' But 
what is this new dispensation ? It is an age in which 

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TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

society awakes, becomes inspired, and runs through a 
great career. 

What a calamity that so many youth fail to see in the 
liberty of our nation the permission to run with enthusiasm 
along the great human path. The majestic crowd of 
witnesses swarming into the sky from the horizon of the 
past ought to command them to cast aside the sins that 
so easily entrap the soul, and ought to allure them with 
the words, 'Come, run the race with us.' The past 
says Come; the present and future join in the music of 
the past. 

The activity, the beauty, the grandeur of man's high- 
way across the earth are at the hidden ends of it, but 
the richly adorned middle ought to assure society that 
here is not all of the human journey, but only a section 
cut from the whole. Unable to bring to England all the 
Greek architecture and culture, Lord Elgin stole only a 
shipload of marbles. The whole Parthenon was too 
large for his ship. Thus this earthly life path is a part 
of the soul's Parthenon. Earth is too small to hold all 
of the soul's beauty. A piece was sent hither, immor- 
tality holds the rest. Man must run until he reaches the 
earthly end. He need not run like a slave, but only as 
runs his heart from its own inherent nature. Man must 
place his dead under the grass and then go back to his 
appointed path. 



AGAPA 



An eminent Greek scholar gives the following valuable explana- 
tion: 

"Prof. Swing used a transliteration of the noun aydnv, which 
has other meaning beside 'love-feast.* Thus you will sometimes 
see the goddess's name Athene or Athena. In a broad sense, with 
many shades of meaning, the verb may be translated 'love,' 'ad- 
mires,' 'respects,' 'approves of,' 'esteems,' or even 'submits or 
acquiesces in.' In the sense 'approves,' 'admires,' it is more 
frequent in Plato than any other writer. It is a word only an 
expert would be sure of using with the right suggestions." — Ed. 



THE MODERN RESPECT FOR 
MANKIND 

One of the best chapters in the New Testament is that 
one in which Paul eulogizes the sentiment which the church 
formerly designated as charity, but which in its revised 
edition it calls love. In that episode Paul wears the robe 
of a rhetorician and the garland of a poet. He amplifies, 
he illustrates, he eulogizes, he reads in figures, he asks us 
to think of clanging cymbals, to look at a procession 
of human virtues, and at last at three beautiful graces, of 
which this one rises above life. Had his words not been 
worn out by the destructive power of endless repetition 
they would stand to-day as an eulogy difficult to be sur- 
passed. But as the perpetual action of the soft water will 
wear away the beautiful tracery cut in rock by the sculp- 
tor's chisel, so repetition will at last make the greatest 
passages in books, sacred or profane, become empty and 
even wearisome to the heart. Many utterances and 
aphorisms of the Bible have thus been emptied of their 
original impressiveness. 

But if endless repetition has taken the word 'charity' 
away from the field of eloquence it cannot remove it from 
the field of philosophy. Love for all that lives is a senti- 
ment which our earth can get clear of only by dying. If 
the moon was once an inhabited globe but has become 
dried, burnt up, its water and atmosphere gone, it has 
lost its charity by losing its life. It is only by such an 
encroachment of death our planet can be divested of its 
need and beauty of a sweeping love. 

Language has, however, become so rich in words, and 
in those many shadings of meanings which cause words, 
that when the mind becomes weary of one form and name 

211 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

of a sentiment, it can take up another name, and see the 
great old truth upon another of its many sides. The 
rear of Warwick Castle is more attractive than the front; 
for there under the walls of the vast dining hall is the 
river Avon. One could almost drop a bucket into the 
water from the windows out of winch royal and beautiful 
faces looked many centuries ago; and there at the right 
are the cedars of Lebanon which religious hands planted 
in the days of the Crusades. Thus the sentiment about 
charity may be viewed upon many sides, and it will often 
come to pass that when the much-emblazoned front 
becomes wearisome, the visitor can move around this sen- 
timental castle and find upon another side the most won- 
derful cedars and the river which helped inspire the 
greatest bard of the world. 

Suppose you say that there are three great virtues: 
Faith, hope, and respect of mankind, and that of these 
the greatest is respect for humanity, then you have only 
walked around a forest or a mountain, or you have only 
crossed a stream or a lake, and have come into the pres- 
ence of new wonders. 

Paul did not use the term we use. He used the Greek 
word, agapa. But that word implied not what our terms 
'love' and 'charity' imply, but rather the sentiment of 
reverence and respect. It came from the verb agapao, 
which stood for all acts of a reverential nature, and for 
all the good will which is expressed by the cultivated 
toward each other. It was used to express the memory 
of the dead, and in performing funeral honors. It was 
the expressing often of that sentiment which the Latins 
expressed by Salve — hail and be happy! It did not ex- 
press that affection which binds a mother to a child or a 
wife to her husband, but that wide kindness which flows 
out from a heart to the whole human race. When the 
names of persons are not even known, when there is no 
actual affection between you and them, still you esteem 
them as members of the family of mankind. 

212 



RESPECT FOR MANKIND 

This was Paul's agapa. 

Sentiments, like roses, grow under culture. In the 
modern times the bed of the roses is made by science and 
labor. All old dead and wild earth is cast away; and 
rich earth placed in a deep trench. There must be just 
water enough and just sunshine enough. Out of long 
industry and thought came at last such roses as Anacreon 
never saw. It ought to be suspected that in a planet 
where flowers result from culture, sentiments would not 
come from neglect. Each age must cast away more of 
the hard, lifeless play, and deepen the trenches in which 
it expects its floral beauty to bloom. Among the plants 
which will bloom the more richly by as much as they 
receive more thought and care, must be counted this 
respect of man for mankind. It is growing and will grow 
until the words of men who do not possess it will be only 
a rattling or clanging noise. Without this wide and deep 
emotion the orator is only a piece of sounding brass. 
No orator can feed all the hungry, or build roofs over all 
who are houseless, but he can respect in all places and 
at all times the human face, and aim his laws and litera- 
ture and science at the immense world of man. The 
'stone-mason' described so touchingly by Lamartine 
would not lay up a wall for a rich man, because he wanted 
to wander around and mend chimneys and walls for those 
who were unable any longer to hire a workman. To toil 
for money seemed less noble to him than to heap up 
stones in the name of human nature. He so simplified 
his own wants that he was not compelled to work for only 
those who had gold. His simplicity of want widened his 
relations to the world. Instead of narrowing his life his 
contempt of money widened it. He did not permit a love 
of money to retard a sentiment. 

An old saint once saw a vision which led him to say: 

' Of a truth, God is no respecter of persons. ' God was 

too great to admit of His cherishing a regard for some 

individuals or for some group of individuals. God could 

213 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

not from all eternity look with peculiar love toward a 
class and designate that group as the elect. He could not 
be a respecter of persons. The Deity would be degraded 
by any sentiment of good will which should not move 
equally in all directions. As the stone-mason did not 
feel willing to have his act limited to persons who might 
possess wealth, as he wished to take his hammer and 
trowel and go forth each morning in the name of a large 
impulse, thus He who made a human heart capable of 
such ideals must not Himself fall below the philosophy of 
His children, and select a few names for a crowning with 
eternal life. By the dogma of such an election charity 
would be made less than faith and hope. It would need 
to resign its place as the 'greatest' and be content with 
a merit infinitely the least. 

' Respect ' is a term which differs from the word ' friend- 
ship ' and the word ' love ' by a very perceptible difference. 
The simple fact that a modern language contains a hun- 
dred thousand words may well lead us to suspect that 
there are many colors of thought, many shades of opinion, 
many tints of emotion. It is a wonderful pleasure to 
read along with a great author like Lamartine, or Cha- 
teaubriand, or John Iluskin, or Cousin, or Castelar, and 
mark the coming and going of words, their differences, 
their harmonies. The tints in the autumn woods, the 
many shades which pass over the clouds at sunset, are 
equaled in number and delicacy by the shades of signifi- 
cance which are spread before us by all those great minds 
which come to us in a richness of speech. The new 
volume of language marks the advance of man toward a 
greater fullness of thought, and a deeper sensibility. 

There exists a sentiment which differs widely from 
love and friendship — namely, respect for the human soul 
in all its circumstances and times. The color or appear- 
ance of a human being may be at discord with our habits 
or taste, but our respect must run out toward all minds 
that reason, and to all hearts that feel. Washington 

214 



RESPECT FOR MANKIND 

would lift his hat to a negro, not because of a personal 
friendship, but because under all the colors of the skin 
there were the one dignity and mystery of soul. Love 
and marriage are poor little words when compared with 
that word ' respect. ' We may love one person or a score 
of persons deeply, but each true man lifts his hat to the 
whole world. All persons not criminals are included in 
this one form of benevolence. The feeling streams out, 
not because the persons have youth or beauty, wealth or 
genius, but because they are in our world and subject to 
its pains and joys. 

Sympathy does not quite express this feeling. Men 
sympathize with persons who have met with some mis- 
fortune, but these persons were respected before their 
misfortune came. We respect a Gladstone: we sympa- 
thize with Ireland. It must be that respect is a form of 
difference shown to the soul. 

It was often a pleasure to think of our nation as being 
founded not only upon the cold doctrine of equal rights, 
but also upon the warmer idea of man's reverence for man. 
Thieves could band together upon the basis of equal 
rights. They could elect a president every four years. 
To equality of right our country adds the more poetic and 
more divine feeling that the poor and the rich, the old and 
the young, man and woman, carry each a nature which 
makes differences sink, and which creates a harmony rich 
as that in the highest music. The rights of man as em- 
bodied in law, are accompanied by the respect for man 
as carried about in the heart. Good as is the Constitu- 
tion of our nation, it is many times less than a cultivated 
heart. 

There are, indeed, ill-gotten millions, and there are 
dishonest men in the land, but the great volume of Ameri- 
can wealth comes from the bounty of nature. In Alabama 
the very rocks of the hills are turning into steel rails; in 
the whole south the fields are growing cotton for half the 
world, and there the trees abound with fruit. To the 
215 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

wonders of nature man has added the wonders of inven- 
tion. Is genius a crime? Are the wheat-fields and cot- 
ton-fields fraudulent in their design and their conduct ? 
The wealth at which the anarchists complain does not 
come from the laws of the state, nor from the police, nor 
from any corruption fund, nor from the moneyed aris- 
tocracy, but from the fact that our nation respects all 
minds alike, and does nothing but admire the genius and 
industry of her children. These are the sources of all 
this troublesome prosperity. These are the monsters 
which pave streets and build palaces. 

The country is based upon a respect for each human 
being. It so respects the human mind that it will not 
place a burden upon it. It says: 'Go, be free; the days 
are your own; your genius is your own. Go and turn the 
sunshine into money; ask the wild grass to become wheat; 
ask steam and electricity to work for you. ' 

The republic was founded, not to make restraints, but 
to remove them from all human shoulders. Men who 
think that prosperity comes from laws and police, need 
some school-house which will teach them that the Creator 
of the universe or nature has commanded the rain, soil, 
and sunshine to turn into gold, and the hills to turn into 
iron, water into power, and the air into light. It is a 
great error in a republic to look upon reading, writing, 
and arithmetic as a useful education. An education 
which omits all political and social science and adds 
to this blunder the omission of a moral science must be 
confessed a defective development of a mind. To add 
up figures is a minor accomplishment compared with 
the power to think like a Franklin or to live in per- 
fect harmony with the highest goodness. To be able to 
write is not desirable unless one possesses a thought to 
be written. 

Our nation would not step between any man and the 
forces and kindness of the universe. It does not bind 
a weak girl, it respects her mind and body, it respects 

216 



RESPECT FOB MANKIND 

her stay in this world and says, 'Go forth, study, toil, 
become wise, happy, rich, beautiful. I am with you 
and for you in all the wide field of such pursuit. I was 
founded by the statesmen not to impede you, but to keep 
any rude hand from separating you from the benevolence 
of the Infinite Father.' 

This is that respect, that reverence, which Paul thought 
greater than faith and hope. He may have seen faith 
and hope as being the relations of man to himself, and 
charity as the relation of man to all others. He may 
have thought that the personal trust and hope of each 
was less noble than one's feelings and actions toward 
his fellowman. He intimated that doctrines will come 
and go, and hopes will pass away by fulfilment, but this 
relation of each heart to all minds will remain as long as 
each soul shall stand encompassed by men or angels. It 
is a sweet and everlasting concord of millions of minds 
scattered in the continents and the ages. 

When you become weary of the words 'love' and 
'charity,' or feel the need of some additional term to 
meet the want of the greater age, turn to this thought of 
respect for all who live, and thus will you approach Jesus 
Christ and the Church and the Nation upon their greatest 
side. Nations are being rebuilt because they have not 
in the dark past contained enough of tins feeling for 
humanity. The Russian throne trembles to-day because 
it has not been sensitive enough to hear the heart-beats 
of ninety millions. The churches are hastening to re-ex- 
press their doctrines because they too realize that there is 
not a pagan nor an honest mind anywhere that is not 
living within the confines of human esteem, and within the 
more tender regard of Him who is the author of all that 
is noble in state or church. By common consent all 
educated beings walk kindly in the churchyards where 
the dead are sleeping. In one of these grassy fields a 
poet, in one of the greatest pieces ever written, felt his lines 
assume a new melody, and his heart expanding so as to 
217 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

take all the names into one richness of song and memory. 
The common consent of the world, of state and church 
and private life will have reached one more beautiful and 
elevating custom when it shall have taught us all to walk 
with a sincere respect among the hosts of the living. 



218 



A BOOK OF REMEMBRANCE 

The prophet Malachi saw lying before the Lord a 
book of remembrance, in which were recorded the deeds of 
the people of earth. In that volume lay, page after page, 
the story of man. This vision may well remind us of that 
reality found in this globe. Here man writes down his 
history. Here he makes a record of his good and evil, 
and leaves behind him a vast book of remembrance. 
It does not, indeed, contain any account of man's begin- 
nings, but it is very full of the experiences, deeds, thoughts, 
and feelings which have come to fill up the wild gulf of 
six or seven thousands of years. The painted and carved 
pictures of far-off faces are of little importance compared 
with that portrait of man furnished by his written thought. 

The Christian nations possess no picture of their Christ, 
but the exact features of Jesus of Nazareth are of little 
value in comparison with the worth of the books in which 
the teachings of the Master are contained. Thus the 
written words of the past form the most valuable por- 
trait of all the bygone years. Job wished that his words 
could be written in iron. It so happened that the wish 
became a fact, for what that heart said so long ago, our 
race is saying still. The book of remembrance is as last- 
ing as iron. The art of writing makes the old trunks of 
trees throw out new limbs and wear new blossoms. Our 
new translations make Homor walk forever in the worlds' 
new streets, and the morals of Jesus come to us as fresh 
as the new lilies of each spring. 

Whittier, Ernest Renan, and Tennyson are to be 
found only in the world's large book. The traveler in 
America cannot by any industry find the form of Whit- 
tier; the lovers of great men cannot meet in Paris or in 
all France the form of Ernest Renan; England with all 

219 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

her power of people cannot speak one word now to the 
ear of her Alfred Tennyson. These three mighty spirits 
have passed into the book of remembrance. They will 
live in that strange iron which has long bound the past 
to the present. 

Literature is the picture of humanity. All other pic- 
tures are poor and false. They lack color and life. The 
body is often a poor representative of the soul. Many 
of the faces of genius have been marked by much ugliness. 
Angelo and Hugo were among the homeliest of all mor- 
tals since Socrates. After the grave hides all this injus- 
tice of the material world, then all the gifted of the earth 
meet in the one beauty of the soul. It thus comes to pass 
that literature is the only true portrait of our race. In 
that great gallery we can see man as he is. His wisdom, 
his taste, his wit, his happiness, and sadness are be- 
fore us in life size. It is a noble characteristic of our 
time that it keeps but one book of remembrance. Whit- 
tier, Renan, and Tennyson lived and died in three dif- 
ferent nations, but they all meet in the land of intellect. 
Literature has but one empire. In that kingdom all 
times and nations are one state. 

Whoever standing in a church makes allusion to these 
three writers must reckon the work of Renan less val- 
uable than the work of the two poets. He was a pure 
rationalist in religion, and thus came in conflict with all 
those churches which assume any miraculous teaching 
or event, but all who expect to be scholars or students 
and the friends of literature must be at all times eclectics, 
and must select what is great and good in the wide field. 
Not even Shakespeare is perfect. The work of elimi- 
nation must be done all the way from Socrates to John 
Stuart Mill. It is difficult to find a perfect tree, a per- 
fect rose, or perfect gem. Each true reader must cast 
aside much from each volume over which his eye is per- 
mitted to pass. After the Christian has revised the pages 
of Renan there remains an immense reward of learning 

220 



A BOOK OF REMEMBRANCE 

and thought. As for beauty, it abounds everywhere. 
To pass through his books is like walking through a field 
or a woods in October. One is surrounded by color, 
by a dreamy air, by fruits already ripe, by leaves that 
are dying, and by birds that are going south. Few pens 
have ever written more delicately. Not many intellects 
have been more acute and at the same time so tender. 

It must not be thought that the writings of this French 
scholar were wholly harmful to the orthodox Christians, 
for these millions had gazed so long at the miraculous 
side of their religion that they had become blind to the 
naturalism of Jesus and his apostles. Afraid of the 
humanity of the case they had caused the whole case to 
become unreal. It had assumed to make the form of a 
pure invention. Of the thirty-five millions of people in 
France only three millions were attending the prayers of 
any branch of the Christian church. Renan did not 
cause this paralysis of the heart. It was brought about 
by all those who excluded from Christianity all except 
what was the most incredible. Mary and Martha wore 
halos instead of the flowing hair of their girlhood. Their 
laughter disappeared; their eyes rolled in a fine frenzy 
toward the far-away sky. As France grew in reason and 
education the popular Christianity revealed more and 
more its absurdity. 

The apostles ceased to be men, and floated in the air 
as imponderable saints. Thus history died and faith 
grew as poor as its food. To such a nation of starving 
souls Ernest Renan came with his arms full of the beauti- 
ful but lost realities. He gave the Christ his lost human 
nature; he rebuilt the little homes of the fisherman; he 
restored the lost picture of human life. The books of 
Renan are, indeed, not much like those of Calvin and 
Edwards, but they are full of truth and tears. When 
we read them we seem to be in Palestine, and to be benev- 
olent with Jesus, or eloquent with Paul, or affectionate 
with St. John. If it is alleged that Renan leveled the 
221 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

gospels until they became common, human books, it 
must be remembered that the Church of France had 
made them read like the mysterious leaves of a Greek 
sibyl. The system of magic had turned thirty millions 
of Frenchmen away from the holy land of Nazareth. 
If those millions shall ever come back they will return 
by help of that realism which almost turned this French- 
man's prose into a song and made his fame that of a poet 
of nature. Renan will not, it is true, become a direct 
path to a church, but he will help the Christian to attach 
his own spirituality to a reality and not to magical rites 
and false dogmas. 

The Christian can add to this realism the facts of 
divineness and immortality. After the poetic skeptic 
has passed all over the field long held by anti-rational 
church, it will be easier for that church to pass to a simpler 
and truer religion ; and thus to win back the millions who 
to-day are wandering among the ruins of an old piety. 
It is an inexpressible pity that Ernest Renan did not 
possess that religious faith which marked Victor Cousin 
and Chateaubriand. Having the finest style known to 
one of the greatest of all languages, and rivaling all the 
poets in sensibility, he needed nothing more except the 
inspiration that comes from a devout faith. One thing 
he lacked — the deep sentiment of religion; but we are 
taught in the fable that nature never gives all power and 
charms to any one soul. 

It may to many clergymen seem best to denounce 
the non-religious writers as being nothing but poison, 
and that all pulpits should mark and denounce them as 
such. Against such a policy it must be said that our age 
can no longer fully regulate the reading done by the 
young or old. 

Books which violate the law are to be suppressed, 
but the liberty of this nation has become so large that 
all minds seem free to discuss Voltaire and Stuart Mill. 
The speeches of agnostics and atheists reach every fire- 



A BOOK OF REMEMBRANCE 

side. Indeed, we may have each one some atheist for 
a personal friend. In such times our hope must lie in 
cultivating the eclectic spirit. We must all read even 
Shakespeare with a canceling pencil in hand. On each 
page the reader must say, 'I do not want that.' 

When the dying Tennyson opened to the play of 
'Cymbeline' he did not indorse the whole play. He 
thought nothing of the low plot of the dramatic piece. 
His heart longed for the one dirge alone. He even waived 
the inquiry whether that dirge was not inserted by a 
poet much inferior to Shakespeare in the verse-making 
art. His heart was to read once more the words : 

' Fear no more the heat o' th' sun, 

Nor the furious winter's rages; 
Thou thy worldly task hath done, 

Home art gone and ta'en thy wages; 
Golden lads and girls all must, 
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 

' Fear no more frown o' the great, * 

Thou art past the tyrant's stroke; 

Care no more to clothe and eat, 
To thee the reed is as the oak. 

The scepter, learning, physic must 

All follow this and come to dust.' 

His failing heart wished to re-read that old good by 
to earth. As he who journeys along a country road will 
pause to pluck a wild flower without caring what weeds 
may surround it, and what wind may have sown its seed, 
thus the human soul, living or dying, may gather in sweet 
truths in the wide land of thought. Let our age be bold 
to select the good and bold to erase all that is unworthy. 
To the realism of the agnostic one may add the spirituality 
of religion, just as to the dirge in Cymbeline the author 
of the 'In Memorian' must have added his own belief 
in a world beyond. The motto of our times may as well 
be : A bold eclecticism, like that of the old saint who was 
indebted to Jew, Greek, and barbarian. 

Whittier and Tennyson will not ask the readers of 

223 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

to-day and to-morrow to make much use of the eclectic 
faculty. Their pages in the book of remembrance need 
no erasures. They are all in harmony with the worlds 
of both God and man. Not as great as the Dantes and 
Miltons and Shakespeares, these two minds were very 
rich in all the later property of the world. 

They were as wide as life itself. They did not — as 
Renan did — omit the larger of the two continents, the 
sentiment of religion. Into the book of remembrance 
they emptied the complete human heart. Whoever in 
the future, near and far, shall read the record of those 
years winch end this autumn will find in history 
those two men have composed all that has been good in 
this century. The morals that emancipated slaves, the 
love of nature that can make a volume out of the snow of 
New England, the love that binds the inmates of a home, 
that makes citizens into patriots, that expands into philan- 
thropy, and then rises up as the soul of religion and the 
definition of God came to Whittier to make a noble page 
in the chronicles of the period. In his character and 
teachings he was greater than Tennyson, but in his breadth 
and genius much less. The Englishman touched the 
whole past, and often employed Ins pen in the service 
of pure romance, and thus fell to the level of the com- 
mon novelist; he gave some part of his time to the 
royalty and pageantry which belonged to the land of a 
queen. These excursions added richness without adding 
greatness. 

The American worked in a narrower field, but it was 
a more perfect garden than that one into which came the 
beautiful Maud. It was a field in which grew the tree 
of man's life. The social life, the political life, the divine 
life of mankind, lay under all those verses woven on this 
side the sea. 

And yet the Englishman was a greater poet. He 
spoke grandly in the name of religion, and then surpassed 
Whittier in his ability to grasp all the world and to invent, 
224 



A BOOK OF REMEMBRANCE 

delineate, and adorn. If Whittier was a symmetrical 
tree, with air and light all around it, Tennyson was a 
whole forest. As an intellectual commander or general, 
Tennyson did not marshal his troops for any one battle 
which might make or change history. He thus falls behind 
the man who fought about Beatrice in Florence and the 
man who fought in the name of a Paradise Lost. It is pos- 
sible for a general to become great only througha great war. 

Poetry has always played a high part in religion and 
is destined to retain long this important relation to piety. 
Poets come by unseen paths. The path and the gate 
are both hidden. 

Poetry ought not to be called an art, because the art 
forms so small a part of the final fact. Hundreds of 
minds can construct lines that are full of resemblances. 
The lines are perfect companions in size, weight, and 
sound. These please us indeed just as we are pleased 
by two columns which stand side by side or by two trees 
which stand by a gate. The skill to make such resem- 
blance is the poetic art. But what must be said of the 
thought which is set by Dante or Shakespeare in such a 
harmonious frame ? The poetic art makes the frame 
from the picture, but what must we call that power which 
produces the picture? It is not an art unless the soul 
itself is an art. Was Demosthenes an art ? Was Webster 
an art ? Rather were these men human minds gifted 
to think and feel deeply. Poetry is therefore a great 
and beautiful utterance set in an artistic frame. 

It is not so much an art as the utterance of a superior 
mind. The common mind understands in a mild degree 
the word, 'country,' or 'nature/ or 'God,' but that 
mind realizes the full import of each term only when 
some poet has passed over the truth. We can all pro- 
nounce the word 'God,' but we all fly to Job and the 
psalms and the hymns of all ages to find a language 
great enough for our hearts. As when we wish to see a 
vast landscape, a thousand beauties in one hour, and 
225 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

by one wide vision we climb the Alps or the Andes, so 
when we wish to feel all the height and depth of some 
truth or sentiment that pertains to humanity or God we 
go to the earth's poetry — those mountain heights of 
human reflection and emotion. There the vision is 
enlarged and the heart beats in its full admiration. When 
man thinks of his mortality he may well repair to the 
' In Memorian ' and ask that poem to talk with him 
about that little grave into which each one must sink. 
If that verse is too long and too entangled the impatient 
one can listen to Whittier's simpler lines: 

' No step is on the conscious floor, 
Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust 
(Since He who knows our need is just), 
That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. 
Alas for him who never sees 
The stars shine through his cypress trees! 
Who hopeless lays his dead away 
Nor looks to see the breaking day 
Across the mournful marbles play! 
Who has not learned in hours of faith, 
The truth to flesh and sense unknown, 
That life is ever Lord of Death, 
And love can never lose its own! ' 

Thus many are the hours in which we run to the poets 
to beg them to express for us our own thoughts and senti- 
ments. We say to the poets: 'I have life, but tell me 
all about it; I have nature, but tell me how beautiful 
nature is; I love humanity, it sings to me the greatness 
of the human race; I believe in a Creator, but help me 
to weep for joy in His presence.' It does not come as a 
dispatch of news, but as a language, and exalted elo- 
quence, and an inspiration. 

The Bible abounds in poetry, because religion is the 
loftiest thought of which the mind is capable. The 
subjects are great and beautiful. God is in the midst 
of it, and not as a simple creator, but as a friend. Man 
is there, not as a simple seeker of gain and pleasure, 
but as a mysterious wanderer between birth and death; 

226 



A BOOK OF REMEMBRANCE 

there as a moral being; there as a penitent; there in 
hope ; there in benevolence ; there in the beauty of all his 
virtue, all his art and song. Such surroundings created 
the book of Job, the psalms, the prophecies, and the 
final outburst by St. John. 

Poetry is, therefore, not a pleasing arrangement of 
words, a harmony of rhythm and sound. These are 
only the decorations of the real substance. 

As a river moves along, ornamented by its banks on 
which wave trees and grass and flutter the wings of happy 
birds, so rhyme and metric feet are only the attractive 
borders of some deep stream of truth. Religion will 
always love the poets, because they possess the height 
and depth which best can express itself. Long ago 
theologians would all have failed had not the poets rushed 
to the help of the people. Theology says there is a God, 
and reason declares he is full of power, but it is poetry 
that says, 'Come unto me all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' In poetry truth 
rises until it reaches the highest sentiment, the most 
finished form of itself. 

When one reflects over the names of the great poets 
who have passed away, the inquiry arises whether they 
equaled their Greek brothers of immortal fame. They 
surpassed the Greeks. This superiority is not in mental 
gifts, but only in the riches the latest age bestows. No 
Greek could have written the 'In Memorian,' because 
there had not come to the human race that mental insight 
and skill which could draw a great poem out of the human 
heart. Our age is much the more spiritual. Beautiful 
as Greece was England and America overshadow it; 
but were vEschylus or Sophocles now living in England, 
the queen would not need pass a day without a lau- 
reate. In any century, however brilliant, these two minds 
would have been able to feel and express all the truth and 
beauty of their age. They were Shakespeares and Ten- 
nysons held in chains by the far past. 

227 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

In our land, so overrun with fiction, whose chief 
object is only to amuse the idle or inflame the sentimental, 
would it not be a great gain should all the most noble 
poetic works come back to the world's heart? In the 
book of remembrance they make an impressive page. 
They record there the best thoughts of our world, for 
only the best thoughts can bear the embellishment of 
verse. Poetry will not touch a political party, but it 
will touch liberty and mankind; it will not admit a reli- 
gious sect into its confines, but it will welcome all the 
splendor of religion; it will not admit botany, but it 
admits all of earth's flowers; it will not speak of Jew 
or Gentile, white man or negro, but over man it has 
always been eloquent; it cares not for kings and palaces; 
it has always been the friend of both the great and the 
humble. It is so lofty that both the king and the begger 
must climb high to reach it. The language of poetry 
embraces only the best words of each mighty tongue. 
As the painters in ideals select the best forehead and the 
most perfect eye and cheek, so the great poets use only 
those words which are rich in high associations of the 
past. The scholarship of poetry must be broad, its style 
most simple, its heart most affectionate and transparent, 
its morality spotless, its religion so broad as to fit all the 
souls that live. 

If, as the old poet said, there lies open before the 
Almighty a book full of the history of mankind, a book in 
which the good and evil of society are garnered, it may 
well be declared that poetry has both created and painted 
the best humanity that is to be seen in that great mirror 
of all the historic centuries. May a merciful sky soon 
send again to the English-speaking millions a poetic 
genius which, like that which has just gone, shall be 
broad, refined, learned, simple, affectionate, and religious. 
For the return of such a form of mind and spirit our 
churches, our homes, and our very streets will not cease 
to pray. 



THE POETS AND IMMORTALITY 

Many of the poets who sing about death are really 
singing about man's common sleep. Such an error is 
not too great for genius to make and enjoy, but it is too 
great a one for the living, sensible multitude to repeat 
The resemblance between sleep and death is slight, the 
difference is infinite. The poet Euripides says: 'O 
queenly Night, thou who sendeth dreamy sleep to the 
mortals who are full of labors, come down. Come with 
swift wings to the Agamemnonian home. Separate the 
inmates from their griefs and their labors.' This beauti- 
ful passage Longfellow enlarged into still more of beauty 
in that beautiful poem which flows thus: 

' I hear the trailing garments of the Night 
Sweep through her marble halls! 
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light 
From the celestial walls! 

Oh holy Night, from thee I learn to bear 

What man has borne before! 
Thou layest thy finger on the lips of Care 

And they complain no more.' 

But from such sleep man soon awakens with life all 
new in his heart; from such night the earth soon turns 
into the flood of new sunbeams, but does the death spoken 
of by the materialists resemble such a rest? Does the 
heart soon awaken refreshed ? Does the morning soon 
come to those under the violets ? Unless it is to come 
there is nothing in death to justify any word of poetic 
praise. Byron speaks of man 'lying down' at last 'to 
pleasant dreams,' but let not such verses deceive us, for 
in death there are no dreams. Let us not go to it indeed 
like a 'galley slave scourged to his dungeon,' but let us 
229 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

not commit the still greater blunder of singing praises to 
the blotting out of a beautiful in a beautiful world. 

Greatly preferable is that religious theory which adds 
to man the mystery of a second life. Seeing that we are 
wholly encompassed by the unknown we dare not say 
or think that death is the end. Man is cut off from know- 
ing the beginning and the end. All the paths known 
to man lead toward an infinite beyond. All ways lead 
to where the distance alone makes a cloud. We dare not 
call a cloud the end. The heart may well wonder about 
a second life, but it does not dare to deny. Mystery forbids 
denial and encourages hope. 

Our world is founded upon poetry. The globe itself 
floats in a sea of ether. As it turns over, on one side it 
sparkles like a crystal ball, and on the other side it is 
dark in shadow. On the brilliant side men work, on its 
darkened side men sleep. While the ball rolls it passes 
under the poetic sun and asks that orb to make for it a 
poetic spring, summer, and autumn. Out of this request 
come the forests, the fields, the grains, and the fruits; 
and, after years have passed by this excess of beauty, man 
appears in these woods and fields and adds to the sublime 
aggregation that awful and rich mystery of life which 
no science can describe and no history contain. Out of 
the beautiful woods and mountains of Judea comes a 
Christ, chanting a group of beatitudes which surpassed 
in sweetness all previous eloquence and song. All poetry 
indeed, but the quick impulse to a new civilization. Ah, 
poetic world ! thy light is composed of a thousand colors, 
thy scenes are all a mystery, thy sounds are all music. 
Touch thee where man may, his eyes are full of wonder, 
and the greatest truth seems only the greatest dream. 

The poet Statius, whom Dante so loved, attempted to 
describe only one little fact of the human career, and he 
stood amazed by one simple phenomena — that of sleep. 
He says: 'Sleep is a hidden grotto in a dense woods. 
Man passes into it. Motionless figures stand all around 

230 



THE POETS AND IMMORTALITY 

his couch. The silent clouds envelop it and keep away 
the roaring of the sea. The angel of silence goes about 
with folded wings and forbids the winds to move the 
branches rudely. She forbids the foliage to rustle. She 
softens the distant thunder. The mountain streams all 
move more silently. The god of sleep is in the bower. 
One hand is under the hair of his left temple, the right 
hand falls and lets go the horn which it held in the long 
day.' Poetry is not the overstatement of truth, it is the 
effort of the soul to reach the reality. 

Alas for the day when religion shall wholly cease to 
mingle its undertone with the poetry of our great, bril- 
liant world! Blessed will this planet be so long as it 
shall say of the dead, ' They sleep ' in God. 



231 



EPILOGUE 



Where gentle waves come slowly into shore, 

Beside the sea-green splendor, loved and praised, 

Sleeps his last sleep the poet-priest who bore 
Man's soul to heaven, in dear hands upraised. 

He swung no censer fragrant with sweet fire; 

His was the incense of God's fairest thought; 
He held the chalice of the soul's desire; 

His faith with jewels all its gold enwrought. 

His priestly robe, all beauteous with gems, 
Was holy eloquence, and truth, and love; 

He knew how poor are earth's best diadems; 
His were the riches of the life above. 

Our poet-preacher, in his words of prose, 
Made life a lyric and its dreams sublime; 

Far from his musing and his hope there goes 
Eternal music for the sons of time. 

No son of thunder with a lightning stroke, 
Smiting an ice-field in his furious blast; 

His was the sun-burst, as from heaven it broke, 
Sure of its triumph when the noise had passed. 

Light white as heaven, warmth as soft as tears, 
Came from his genius like an April day. 

So, melting dogmas with their twilight fears, 

Summer hath conquered in the breath of May. 

Hard were the bands that held the feet of Truth, 
Weary of cold and frozen into creeds; 

His sunny soul hath kissed her lips and youth; 
Lo, Truth comes bearing harvestings of deeds. 

23o 



TRUTHS LEAF BY LEAF 

His was the fragrance when the storm is done — 
Breath of the lilies when the sky is clear. 

Through all the tumult, God had this strong son 
Telling our doubtings: ' The Divine is here.' 

One to this prophet were the good and true — 
One with all beauty in the earth and sky; 

His was the faith that gave this world its due, 
His was the love that laid its honors by. 

He loved the Christ whose beauty was more dear 
And sweeter far than strains of angel's lyre; 

For this alone — Christ filled life's deepest tear 
With God's own glory and divine desire. 

Far on the edge where seas of doubt roll high, 

This soul was calm, 'midst surf and storm unvexed; 

Far o'er the waves, beneath a clouded sky, 
Moved a fair soul with doubtings unperplexed. 

Ye called him vague ? What soul who stands and knows 
All man would feel and all that man may find, 

Waits not in silence ? For truth's morning rose 
Opes leaf by leaf within the faithful mind. 

Never did he with trumpet call the brave 

Round some rush-light that soon must die away. 

He spake ' 'Tis dawn ! ' when o'er the earth and wave 
Quivered the promise of a new-born day. 

His was John's gospel of the love divine; 

His was the logic of the human heart; 
His was the sight, intuitive and fine, 

Finding the Savior in life's common mart. 

Where, asking questions, Socrates had found 
Wisdom and silence in the open mind, 

There, in old Greece, he lived in thoughts profound, 
Near the Mge&n was his hope enshrined. 

236 



THE EPILOGUE 



What hours were they, when, on the streets of Rome, 
Walking with him, philosopher and seer, 

Horace or Virgil led our poet home, 

Nor asked a verse to make his presence dear. 

Both Greek and Roman, intellect and law, 

Found in his Christ their whole demand fulfilled.- 

O for the vision and the Face he saw 

When adoration bade the creeds be stilled! 

Moan, autumn winds! His autumn-time was here; 

Ruddy and golden all the fruit he bore; 
'Midst harvest-sheaves and leafage brown and sere 

We say, 'Farwell, but not f orevermore ! ' 

— Frank Wakeley Gunsaulus. 



237 



jUN 14 1905 






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